Clearly, you've never worked for any government agency in the USA.
No need to. I see the same and worse shit here (looking at the tax office using an old-ass version of Apache that's been EOL for nearly a decade and half now, and that's supposed to be free software, and the pirated software black hole that lives in the public administration).
Doesn't change the fact that they should properly manage their systems tho.
You act like the retail box price is the only way to bu the OS. Let me guess, you think that Office cost $300 and theres no way anyone owns a legal copy for under $50 too?
The retail box doesn't exist here. The equivalent is purchasing it through the MS Store if you want an official license (which gets tied to your account, with all the conveniences and problems that may bring).
Also, let's establish for this conversation that "legal" copy means you abide by all the terms of your license. Getting a key that was meant for only a certain company's use isn't legal, though I doubt anyone could truly do anything against you, since you'd not be a company, but rather a home user.
Granted, if that PC is in a company using a license from a different company, it could be problematic (I've known of companies getting sued and forced to pay the licensing costs plus fines here over pirated and misappropriated licenses for Office and Windows).
theres no way anyone owns a legal copy for under $50 too
Funnily enough, it's 50 dollars here for the Home 2024 version... though because of the taxes imposed on foreign currency and offshore payments you end up paying 75 or so. Personally tho I went for the subscription option, mostly for the convenience of it allowing me to share my license with five other people with five devices each, plus the 1TB Onedrive for each one. Since it was 35 dollars or so for the year, I guess I could say I got 6 licenses for a total of 30 devices for the price of 6 dollars per license or basically 1 dollar per device, if I really wanted to be flexible with this and stretch it out that much.
This is the beginning of rent-a-windows
Microsoft sort of already does it, I guess, though you basically rent a whole instance in the cloud with a set config of CPU cores/RAM/storage. Business/Enterprise only tho
Windows 365 is for businesses that want to deploy Cloud PCs across their organization for an unlimited number of users.
www.microsoft.com