OS Piracy? Has RISC OS become prominent?

For obvious reasons I’m not going to post the link, but on one of my random Google searches for risc os related items I discovered a site which claims to have an iso image of RO6. They do point to RPCEmu and Virtual Acorn for the required emulator so they do know what it is.¹

The front page claims the only software eligible for inclusion is beta or over 10 years old. Now my mental maths says that since RO6 was announced October 2006 and appeared in 2007 so it isn’t 10 years old²

It’s sort of disheartening that the vultures start picking on the bones of something that’s still alive and heartening that they think it’s worth it.

I wonder if they are likely to pirate RO5?³ Further, will they pirate RO applications?

¹ Which is worrying in some respects as they may have more malign friends.
² Not that the age makes any difference, it is still commercial software
³ Perhaps not being aware that it’s a free download.

I discovered a site which claims to have an iso image of RO6.

Meh. It’s been on the infamous Swedish piracy place for ages.

Problem is – have you actually tried running it? There is a clone of the riscos.com site on a retro site; but as far as I’m aware, the “legitimate” ISO images originally available from select.riscos.com (a rar file of about 150MiB) require installation using an installer which will first ask you for your registration details.
If it’s just a copy of that, then you are no further forward if you don’t have the details…

It’s sort of disheartening that the vultures start picking on the bones of something that’s still alive

…RISC OS Select is still alive?

I wonder if they are likely to pirate RO5?

That would be funny. Right up there with offering pirate versions of Ubuntu. ;-)

Further, will they pirate RO applications?

We all know the answer to this. Piracy is nothing new. Not here, not anywhere.

Some people want pirate software ‘cos they are cheap and wouldn’t bother to buy the “real thing”. Some people want pirate software because for them it is like a sort of collection, like trading cards, or maybe just a big game of Pokémon. And some people want pirate software because….there is supposed to be a third clause but I think the above two cover most of the reasons.

It’s just one of those things that a commercial producer needs to take into account; though I hope they would take a leaf out of David Pilling’s book and implement registration by burning the user’s name and address into the program in some way and displaying it very prominently at app start. We’ve been there – key discs, dongles, encoded media, blah blah and they have all been hacked (even Computer Concept’s infamous Impression dongle (this thing) was hacked within weeks of release), and the lesson that should have been learned is that protection didn’t really and utimately just inconvenienced the legitimate users…

Meh. It’s been on the infamous Swedish piracy place for ages.

Russian in this instance.

Problem is – have you actually tried running it?

I think you have to download it first, unless I have things all muddled.
The phrase I used was “claims to have an iso” but changing that to “has an iso” would require a download to verify the claim.

I did a similar search and also found some download sites proclaiming to be RISC OS 6.20 ISO downloads – these were torrent sites. I did download it, but got a ‘.dmg’ file instead – as I was downloading on a Mac, it looks like it recognised this and found the appropriate file. I can assure you that this is not an ISO image of the CD, but is in fact a virus of some sort – I deleted it right away without opening it.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if I tried the same thing in RISC OS!

(Incidentally, I own a legit copy of the CD, and this was just for interests sake)