China crushes Tomato Garden

The Chinese government officially buried the most infamous (and some would say, successful) software piracy scheme in history when four of people behind the distribution of pirated Microsoft operating systems were jailed and fined for their part in distributing the infamous "Tomato Garden" versions of Windows XP distributed from the tomatolei.com website.

Tomato Garden versions of Windows are like regular Windows with all copy protections bypassed, but were also ineligible for software and security updates distributed by Microsoft, and as anyone who works in internet security is only too aware of, Tomato Garden XP is responsible for millions upon countless millions of rampant unchecked security threats thanks to the complete and utter lack of software updates available to fix Microsoft security vulnerabilities exploited by malware programmers.

So why was Tomato Garden so popular when Microsoft sold legal copies of Windows XP at an extremely competitive price in China? I'll leave it to a cynic, or Chinese software consumer, to answer this one.