The U.S. military’s budget is so incredibly massive, we never thought they would have any reason to use iffy copies of Windows operating systems. Yet, here we are.
An unnamed U.S. soldier reportedly told TorrentFreak that an education center located in the Camp As Sayliyah military base, where he’s stationed in Qatar, houses 18 PCs, all of which are running unlicensed copies of Windows 7. This comes after the Obama administration settled a military software piracy case last month for the hefty sum of $50 million.
“All of the computers in this computer lab show that the operating system is not a genuine copy,” said the soldier. “I am not anti-government in any way, but I have been in the Army a long time, and I feel the Army should be kept honest and accountable for what they do, especially when it is so public and a hot button issue in these times.”
Photos purportedly provided by the soldier show that the machines provide users with pop up notifications indicating that the copies of Windows 7 running on them aren’t legitimate and require valid product keys. The soldier brought the problem up with his superiors, but there haven’t been any visible efforts to rectify the issue.
Considering that the Defense Department and Microsoft agreed to a $617 million pact to bring Windows 8 to many of the military’s computers earlier this year, it’s unclear as to why these machines in Qatar are running iffy copies of Windows 7 when it appears as if Windows 8 is sitting there for them at the ready. Perhaps someone didn’t get the memo to make the switch.
