Vista licensing restrictions

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My point is I should have the right to do as many as I like.
How many, well that all depends on how long we have vista for, we have had XP for what 5 years?! I must have reinstalled it at least 10 times for one reason or another. Thats a whole lot of vista liscences!

 

IMO the bottom line is Microsoft is loosing the plot. All these new features are really starting to take the mickey out of people!

 

The new license just addresses the previous EULA and technology that wasnt around 5 years ago

for instance, the current XP EULA has EXACTLY the same limitation regarding re installations, it just worded it poorly enough to get around it
If you dig deeper you will find that only a change of mobo or HDD require a reactivation, and the limit is not applied if there is a fault! (the same excuse peopel give these days when re activating) so nothings really changed

As for the VMWare side, this really only effects there bottom of the line products, most if not all technical people should not be using those versions for virtual installs anyway, besides at there retail prices who would want to? you would ideally want your VL copy for such things

For the record, they are also scrapping the current implementation of Corporate Licensing (ie the nice no activation route)
you now have MAKs (multi activiation keys) for small orginisations or unconnected staff, and you have to build a key server that clients activley check in with every 180 days to stay activated, the key server in turn connects back to the MS Activation servers for larger orgs and enterprises! eek

This is to stop the raft of corporate keys that found there way onto the internet (and many it staffs home networks)

Oh how fun all this new stuff is going to be... lol

 

Um, not quite. See this part of the Reg article I posted:

That's crazy, if a company wants to implement Vista as their desktop OS, they have to throw in a couple of extra servers as well? That's just going to add to the massive cost of a move to Vista most people are already anticipating.

 

Baba, i'd avise you to take all register articles with a pinch of salt at the best of times (yes, i've read the article )
if you have ever had to deal with customer support at MS regarding activation you would know there stand on re activation once your limited amount of times have expired, theres a good reason people say 'my hard drive broke' and thats it, wording aside, this was there intention and they try to enforce it even now
remember users are not purchasing a copy of the software but a license to use it, that license can be as strict as they want it to be, it's after all their product.


I dont think any serious enterprise would consider the licensing server aspect a problem to be fair, many many enterprise products require one in various forms. it can even be installed on XP and with virtualisation becoming more and more rampant in the enterprise market space i doubt an additional server or an additional service on an existing server will cause many businesses of that size a major concern when rolling out 100 or 10000 new desktops

 

What Microsoft say and what is written in the EULA aren't necessarily the same thing Phoenix.

 

Well i'll agree to disagree Baba mate
my point was that the limitation still exists, despite the poor EULA wording in XPs EULA, and the result to the end user is somewhat unchanged

 

Seems the wording is likley to be changed again

http://www.theregister.com/2006/11/03/ms_vista_climb-down/

 

It has been changed...so we can all breathe easy now......sorry Freddy...looks like Microsoft realised their error and now know they cant let down their hardcore fans...

 

At least they are beginning to listen to what their customers want, not what MS think they need.

 

No widespread bitching about unreasonable clauses and demands in Vista's EULA = no changes in the Vista EULA. You guys can slam people like me who point out MS's warts and complain loud and long about their unreasonable policies all you want, but you owe people such as I, not necessarily me as I don't claim to have much influence, a debt because otherwise there would be no change in MS's policies. Their policies still keep getting more and more restrictive, but at least we slow the pace down somewhat.

If more people would just become active in protesting this stuff rather than just ignoring it all things might actually improve. They can't make a profit on a public who won't buy their products so if more people would just start voting with their pocketbooks and not just passively accepting harsh and unreasonable restrictions you MS users might actually get to use your computers as they were intended to be used: for the distribution of knowledge and ideas, not the restriction of knowledge and ideas.

 

I agree, every person that posts on the Internet has a voice which may be heard. It is always worth fighting for you rights.

I am really glad that they have changed their minds over this. Freddy you have a lot of influence in all the forums you post in. You might be surprised, maybe someone at Microsoft is a ffreeloader fan

 

Freddy, I'll agree with you in a rather backward way. Overall, the squeaky wheel does get the grease, but there are uniform differences between the Linux faction and the Windows (enthusiast) faction -- one enjoys their product, the other doesn't. One supports their product, one doesn't. One buys their product, one doesn't. You may have both been saying similar things, but M$ only heard the side that butters their bread. The M$-entrenched sites, and subsequent articles on licensing, and the interaction with the M$ dev/tech blogs affected this change. M$ could care less what Linux.com, NewsForge, and other naysayers write -- after all, they don't have a company to run and profits to calculate. The Linux faction *isn't* a company (by and large), and therefore the community doesn't understand what M$ deems as business. Take all the credit you want, but I believe it was largely a product of customer feedback.

By the way, how have you been?

 

Ummm.... You didn't read my post very closely. I never said I had any influence, least of all with MS. What does happen though is that by many of us bringing up the issues they get publicized in many places, to MS users. Then MS users start to look at the issues and some, most definitely not all, start to raise their voices too, and that is who MS must listen to or go broke. If many of us who are Linux users and privacy advocates weren't watching what MS does, and raising the alarms the biggest majority of Windows users would never be aware of what is happening. That's how Linux users and privacy advocates affect change, even with MS.

How many people here knew about the licensing issues before a "microsoft hater" brought up the issue here? Most people here just accepted it or assumed that what MS wrote they didn't mean. That turned out not to be true as MS changed the language. If they hadn't meant what they said they would not have changed the wording.

Probably the worst part of the language is still in the EULA though. The bit about censorship of benchmarks is a serious one for all Windows users. MS can change the rules in mid stream on researchers and also forces them to use only benchmarking indices, tools, and methodology that MS says they can. That means no neutral/independent benchmarking tests can be published because MS sets all standards by which anyone can benchmark their product. That pretty much guarantees warped results. Don't think they will go after people over this? They already have when a couple of researchers did a comparative benchmarking between NT and 2000. They landed on those guys like a ton of bricks and the researchers had to pull their results.

Their language also raises the bar monetarily for security researches as no release other than Ultimate can be used in a VM. This also means that people/businesses who are going to run Vista on virtualization hardware will have to pony up for the most version of Vista. Plus, how about the the new quad core processors that are coming out? Vista is limited to 2 processors.

 

Freddy, you didn't answer fortch's other question - how have you been?

 

You made me laugh and snort water out my nose with this one, Bluerinse.

 

Actually all premium editions can be run as a VM
Home Premium, Enterprise and Ultimate and most corporates including security researchers will be using Enterprise as its one of the few available in a VL package

I understand the need to run tests on various version of the operating system, and this would hamper that effort, i feel its mainly based around the increasing demand for VDI solutions, they are obviously pushing you toward the high end product line for VDI

 

I was expecting your four rolling smilies