Pirates frequented the Office – Newspaper Kommersant No. 207 (7408) of 09.11.
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Up to 185,000 facts of downloading system and office software from Microsoft via torrents are recorded in Russia per day, calculated in Peer Trace. The popularity of Windows and Office distributions has been growing since August, market participants attribute this to the demand of schoolchildren and students. However, experts admit that the commercial sector also makes a serious contribution to the indicators, which cannot yet integrate Linux computers into the infrastructure.
“Kommersant” got acquainted with the information of Peer Trace (distributor of data on content downloads) about the number of unique IP addresses from the Russian Federation, from which pirated copies of Windows and Microsoft Office are downloaded or distributed via torrents. The service revealed 174,000 facts of downloading and distribution only during November 1 of this year. This is 24.4 thousand more than on the same day in 2021.
Peer Trace notes that the number of distributions and downloads of Windows and Microsoft Office by Russian users, if you do not take into account falls on weekends, has been gradually growing since the end of summer, the peak of 185 thousand facts fell on October 24.
Microsoft in March because of the military operation in Ukraine stopped sales of new products in the Russian Federation, in June the company announced a reduction in operations in the country. The availability of its software on the Russian market has declined: a subscription to the Microsoft 365 office suite has disappeared from the range of retail and online stores. In September, Softline and Allsoft, which belongs to it, resumed sales of subscriptions, but by November the number of Microsoft products available for order was again reduced.
At Allsoft, where back in October it was possible to subscribe to Microsoft 365, now you can only buy an unlimited, but more expensive license for Office 2021. The company explained to Kommersant that such keys will be available only until the stock runs out: “Users are starting switch to Russian analogues due to supply restrictions”.
The popularity of Windows and Office distributions on torrents, according to Peer Trace, also grew at the end of 2021, from 106 thousand addresses in early August to 160 thousand at the end of December. The demand for pirated versions of Microsoft products in Russia is “tied to educational stages in schools and universities,” notes a Kommersant source in the field of software development: “When the need for popular solutions for writing texts and designing tables grows, the number of downloads from torrents also increases” . The decline in activity both this year and last year falls on the summer, but even the minimum values (96 thousand on July 21, 2021 versus 132 thousand on July 16, 2022) indicate an increase in distributions.
Private consumers “think that since Microsoft left Russia, its rights can be violated” regardless of the availability of Windows and Office for sale, says Dmitry Sokolov, director of the Non-Commercial Partnership of Software Vendors (NP PPP). Growth in the use of unlicensed software among companies is not observed, he assured, citing the results of checks on the statements of copyright holders to the police.
The head of the board of the Digital Economy Development Fund German Klimenko, on the contrary, believes that corporate users who need to expand their PC fleet are involved in the growth in downloads of pirated copies of Windows. According to him, it is almost impossible to integrate Linux computers into an infrastructure built on Microsoft solutions: “Therefore, in order to comply with the import substitution plan, companies buy the cheapest Linux from the domestic software registry, and install a hacked OS from Microsoft on computers.”
In the public sector, the transition to domestic software is carried out by a planned method, while private users choose software based on habit, said Nikolai Komlev, executive director of the Association of Computer and Information Technology Enterprises. He suggested that the growth in downloads of pirated versions of Windows was facilitated by an increase in the proportion of computers without a pre-installed OS (see Kommersant of July 6). To change the situation, in his opinion, can “both restrictions on downloading new versions of Windows, and the emergence of new products that will work better on Linux-based systems.”
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