I agree with Nihil, someone who cannot afford to buy windows XP (or any other app) was never going to buy it in the first place, so a free copy is their only hope. I read figure of millions of windows copies being pirated in china alone, but does this mean that all the folks who used them would have bought the software if they had to? I seriously doubt it.

While I do not condone software piracy the bottom line is that the amount of revenue actually lost to software piracy is nowhere near like the figure touted.