Microsoft is making Windows 10 free for pirates after all

When Microsoft first announced that Windows 10 would be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users, one of the first questions that people had was whether or not the free upgrade would apply to people who had pirated copies. The company made it clear that, while even users with unlicensed copies of Windows would be able to upgrade, their copy of Windows 10 would still be unlicensed. However, three months after Windows 10 launched, Microsoft is considering giving people with pirated copies of Windows a free, licensed copy of Windows 10 regardless.

If you pirated Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, Microsoft wants to welcome you back—all is forgiven. Microsoft said Thursday that it will run an “experiment” to offer a path for those users who have either pirated or purchased an unlicensed copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to download a licensed copy from Microsoft itself, or to use a code from a third-party reseller. Either way, the licensed Windows 10 software will be used to update the PC with a valid license. “We’d like to welcome as many of these customers as possible to the legitimate Windows ecosystem,” Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said in a blog post Thursday afternoon. Microsoft originally said in March that users with a pirated copy of Windows 7 or 8.1 would be able to upgrade to Windows 10. The company later clarified that any user who did so would still be running an unlicensed copy. It’s unclear how much software in the world is pirated—the Business Software Alliance claimed that in 2010 four out of ten software programs installed around the world were illegally copied—but Microsoft’s free upgrade to Windows 10 has surely cut into that. Otherwise, Amazon sells a USB flash drive with Windows 10 Home installed upon it for $110, and Microsoft itself sells Windows 10 Pro for $200.