Firms with valid Microsoft site licences cannot legally install Windows on PCs bought without the operating system, Microsoft has warned. Many companies with volume licences routinely apply a disk image over pre-installed software to achieve a standard configuration. But firms that try to cut costs by purchasing “naked” PCs, sold without an operating system, cannot legally install a Windows image because site licences only permit upgrading from a pre-installed version of Windows. […] Rob Enderle of analyst firm Giga Information Group warned companies not to ignore the small print. “By contract, [PC makers] have to report any customer that requests naked PCs and it often triggers a software audit by Microsoft. We’ve seen seven-figure bills go to those that were caught.” Read the story at VNUnet.
Microsoft Does Not Allow Installation of Windows on “Naked” PCs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
> This is funny but you don’t even think about Sun’s Java.
> Sun’s Java is free, and it has the same exact support
> behind it.
Actually Sun’s Java isn’t free neither, they are paying their developer and support team by software deals with OEMs. Consumers can *download* and *use* JVMs for free, but saying Java is free is incorrect IMO. The same goes for Internet Explorer in which case the development and support has been and is being funded by Windows sales.
> Is Redhat gives away the OS Linux
Linux isn’t RedHat’s OS to give away, they cannot own it due to its nature. RedHat therefor is mainly selling services like support, training and consulting to other enterprises. They fund their development costs with this too. RedHat is also very small compared to Sun and Microsoft.
> The reason why you are saying Internet Explorer is not
> free, is that you hate Microsoft so much that you are
> ready say anything against Microsoft.
That is not true, I actually like Microsoft. I don’t like Windows, MSDOS or Internet Explorer products very much but I admire them for their marketing and “we can do whatever we want, just watch us” attitude. This is very bad for a competitive computing market however.
> They had to buy from the smaller markets, because they
> offer better products, but they were not smart enough to
> understand that.
I’m not stating that at all. All I am pointing out is that something needs to be done for competitive OS and webbrowser market to return.
> By the way I suggest you to read the history of the
> computers and you will see why MSDOS became such a
> success, and why IBM selected MSDOS. The price was the
> key point.
Actually Amigas during the uprise of the MSDOS platform were cheaper and offered a superior environment compared to the PC platform. Lack of proper marketing by Commodore was the most important reason why it wasn’t really a success fot the United States with regard to ordinary consumers. The only real success with regard to USA was with leading graphics, video, television, entertainment, military and high tech companies. Marketing is less important for European consumers and only therefor the Amiga was a huge ordinary consumer success in Europe.
Noone here cares what operating system you use. Trust me.
–
The article does not say that Microsoft is lying about their
license policy. Nor is the article itself misleading. If your
company has a site license, it would be considered illegal for
you to go out and buy ‘naked pcs’ and then use the media that
came with the site license on those ‘naked pcs’.
The article is attempting to bring this policy to the attention
of the general public. Maybe that is MS bashing. I don’t think so.
–
Since no other software company on the planet is in the same position
as Microsoft, in either market share or sheer number of software
products, it is almost impossible to make any kind of comparisons with
other software companies. Microsoft spent almost $4 billionUS
on R&D last year, and without a doubt they make some great products.
–
The discussion is not new either. 2 years ago Microsoft had a
program set up whereby system builders were rewarded for snitching
on companies that were attempting to buy PCs without an OS.
Since the program was roundly critized MS had to come up with
a way to make it impossible for a company to buy a PC without
an OS. MS may have been attempting to curb piracy but the message
was clear to all ‘system builders’. If you sell machines without
an OS, we will find out about it and we will do everything in
our power to make life difficult for you. This is the point we
should be discussing. But alas…
Maybe impossible is too strong a word. I imagine that if a company
wanted to buy full licenses for all required MS products then
Microsoft would be more than happy to fill the order.
And then this company would be able to go out and buy naked pcs
and buy the necessary licenses. Of course this would cost
3 or 4 times more than a site license and add to the admins
workload a bit. With this approach though you would
be under NO obligation to upgrade until you were ready and with
the state of operating systems at the moment a company may not
feel it necessary to upgrade from XP and all other related back office
products for several years. Maybe it would not be than much more
expensive. Really. A full license is transferrable. A full license
does not expire at the end of a contract. Renew, buy out, or remove.
Am I bashing MS yet ?? Just checking.
–
Remember the topic is naked PCs. Naked pcs are what we are talking about.
At no time are you to talk about anything else but naked pcs.
at least mention naked pcs once in your 5000 word treatises on the
computer industry. PLEASE. I like this board and I would hate for
it to be overrun by people that like to hear themselves talk.
Remember the topic is naked PCs. Naked pcs are what we are talking about. At no time are you to talk about anything else but naked pcs.
You should at least mention that not all naked PCs are meant by that. That’s why the headline is misleading. It affects PCs bought by enterprises that have an Enterprise Agreement with MS and install an upgrade without actually having bought the full license in the first place.
Who is to blame?
– Company that buys upgrade without having a full license
– Microsoft that sells upgrade for PCs that have full license
From the article: But firms that try to cut costs by purchasing “naked” PCs, sold without an operating system, cannot legally install a Windows image because site licences only permit upgrading from a pre-installed version of Windows.
How could they cut costs in the first place? Big companies go with Dell, let’s say. Dell now sells PCs without Windows. They charge the same price no matter whether it has Windows installed or not. I say, call up Dell and give them a piece of your mind.
They are getting paid … so what is their gripe about ?
Damn idiots … they remind me of a dog chasing it’s own tale …
I believe people misunderstand what is happening here. I didn’t read the entire thread, but got through about the first 40 w/o seeing this mentioned.
These are not full site licences, they are upgrade site licences. If the company buys a site licence for a full version of Windows, they can install it on as many blank machines as they wish. Of course, companies would rather buy the upgrade because it is cheaper! However, there is a reason it is cheaper; this is incentive for customers to stay with MS, to upgrade. Otherwise MS would only offer the full price product.
Does anyone (who believes in commercial software) believe that MS should allow people who have bought an upgrade licence solely because it is cheaper for their company to install a full version of the product (which they didn’t pay for)?
I may have missed the boat here, the server which hosts this article seems to be not responding, so I didn’t read the whole article. This is only my understanding from reading Eugenia’s quote.
These are not full site licences, they are upgrade site licences.
This is what I have mentioned a few times. I even gave a link to the MS site that explains it all. However, there is little interest in facts like these. It is more fun to complain about MS. And from there it goes on and on and on…
Microsoft does not offer a Volume license that contains a full
license. All Volume licenses are upgrade only. Open, Select,
and Enterprise. Only allow upgrades.
As you will also find out on the page listed, all licenses for MS
operating system software products, even including upgrades,
once installed on a system are NOT transferrable to another
even if removed from original.
Dell charges the same price for both because of an agreement with
with Microsoft that forces Dell and all other OEMs to pay
the MS license fee for every PC shipped. ‘Forces’ is probably too
strong a word but the deal offered to Dell and other OEMs is
too good to pass up.
–So Dell saves money on the Microsoft tax.
–Microsoft pretty much guarantees that every PC shipped has windows
preinstalled.
–For now at least, the market is kept happy.
Trust me. The whole ‘naked pc’ arrangement is setup to
guarantee that 99% of pcs shipped have a MS operating system
preinstalled, making this ‘ecosystem’ very difficult to crack.
For now at least, the market is kept happy.
Go back and read my comment on page 76-90
Mike Bouma: Linux isn’t RedHat’s OS to give away, they cannot own it due to its nature.
Red Hat owns the tools that makes Linux actually useful, like Anaconda. They could keep it propreitary and charge for it. The very fact that they allow customers download their distribution for free doesn’t mean no production costs go into it. But the customers get it for free, like IE customers now.
The paying customers for support and consultation are the one absorbing the cost, doesn’t mean they are literary buying Linux.
Mike Bouma: but I admire them for their marketing and “we can do whatever we want, just watch us” attitude. This is very bad for a competitive computing market however.
The problem isn’t with Microsoft. The whole big fucking problem is with the competition. Without competent competition, there is no competitiveness in the market. Good products doesn’t mean good sales. There’s were most companies go wrong. They don’t know the very basics of marketing.
Mike Bouma: Marketing is less important for European consumers and only therefor the Amiga was a huge ordinary consumer success in Europe.
Wrong. Amiga spent the same amount of time marketing in Europe as in USA. The problem was that IBM, Microsoft and Apple didn’t bother about Europe, which was then a recovering second world continent. So naturally Amiga got more sales in Europe because it’s marketing is more than any other company.
Sikosis: Damn idiots … they remind me of a dog chasing it’s own tale …
You mean tail? Though it seems stupid for you, it actually remove nervousness and anxiety from the dog, as well being a good form of exercise from dogs. It also increase their hunting skills.
Richard James: Go back and read my comment on page 76-90
Read’s CDN comments too, it pratically rebutts your comment.
And Sergio, thanks for picking my side 🙂
And yadayada, could you not press [Enter]/[Return] after every line? it is making reading harder.
> There’s were most companies go wrong. They don’t know
> the very basics of marketing.
Yes I totally agree with you that good marketing is essential and sadly even far more important than offering a superior product. The fact is however that most innovative companies simply don’t have anywhere the cash reserves Microsoft does for marketing and therefor are close to invisible to ordinary consumers.
Also Microsoft’s monopoly abuse offers an extra brick wall to go through for competitors. IMO it’s the US goverment’s (or in the future an international body) job to make sure there are large enough doors in these walls for competitors to go through. Then a competive OS and webbrowser market may return. (Microsoft themselves don’t like doors for potential competitors to go through)
> Wrong. Amiga spent the same amount of time marketing in
> Europe as in USA.
Yes, close to nothing compared to the PC clone marketing. Commodore was convinced that Amigas would sell by themselves. And although they were right to some extend (especially with regard to specialized companies) they were totally wrong with regard to their marketing towards ordinary European consumers. They mainly marketed the low-end computer models as gaming consoles instead of enlightening the consumer what great multi-media advantages Amigas offered.
> The problem was that IBM, Microsoft and Apple didn’t
> bother about Europe, which was then a recovering second
> world continent. So naturally Amiga got more sales in
> Europe because it’s marketing is more than any other
> company.
I totally disagree, these and lots of other PC companies did massive PC marketing in Europe. Just take Commodore as an example, they did more PC marketing than Amiga marketing!
Not because of the whole netscape fiasco, that is not much of a deal. This is, this is abuse of power and monopoly and should be stopped. This is important for a great deal of people (instead of Sun feeling like a five year old who can’t play anymore because of Java, or AOL being pissed because they can’t own the web) and sounds like the big computer companies being in bed with Microsoft.
I for once would never ever buy a standard computer from Dell, HP, etc. They are not what I want, and they will cost me MUCH more for MUCH less, often sub standard components (a.k.a. crap).
CDN does not rebutt my comment at all the only thing he rebutted was my assertion that Microsoft ups their prices. Which has nothing to do with the rest of it.
CDN does not rebutt my comment at all the only thing he rebutted was my assertion that Microsoft ups their prices. Which has nothing to do with the rest of it.
Huh? When did I say anything about prices???
– You should at least mention that not all naked PCs are meant by that. That’s why the headline is misleading. It affects PCs bought by enterprises that have an Enterprise Agreement with MS and install an upgrade without actually having bought the full license in the first place.
CDN
—
Actually the ONLY people that can install a MS operating system legally, on a ‘naked PC’ , are the people that for some reason or other went out and bought the Packaged Retail Product or those with an MSDN subscription.
Noone else. Individuals or companies. Period.
That PC that you have at home that you bought at a store or on the internet, has an OEM license and is NOT transferrable. You cannot use the CDs that came with your old dead machine and install an OS onto the ‘naked pc’. Of course thats only if you want to be legal, I could not care less if you want to use Microsoft products legally.
The outcry is that once the OS has been installed onto a machine, the license is tied to that particular machine. Yes you can replace parts that break but once the machine itself dies you have to get a new license. Thats what the web page says. Read it.
The headline to this article should be perhaps
“Only People with Full Packaged Retail Product can install a MS OS onto a naked PC.” Thats not very catchy is it.
It is NOT possible for an individual or a company to buy a PC that has a MS operating system preinstalled that comes with a FULL license. All preinstalled operating system licenses are OEM licenses and thus are not transferrable for any reason. OEM licenses are not a full licenses. Of course a company would be able to use a network install to UPGRADE the OEM license on a machine. Of course the admin guys can use the few CDs that come with the Volume Site license to upgrade all the OEM machines on site.
Volume Site Licenses include Open, Select, and Enterprise.
All Volume Site licenses are upgrade ONLY licenses.Companies buy volume licenses for the client and server back office software and operating systems. A volume license is a lease. At the end of the lease you have to renew, Buy Out, or REMOVE. Zero ownership.
Those are the facts CDN. And yes I am going on and on.
If customers decide that they want to lease their software then fine, let ’em. However when I give a software company my hard earned money, I want more ownership rights than what Microsoft is willing to give me. I don’t want to pirate their stuff but I do want to feel at least that I have some ownership. And that is not the case at this time.
If customers decide that they want to lease their software then fine, let ’em. However when I give a software company my hard earned money, I want more ownership rights than what Microsoft is willing to give me. I don’t want to pirate their stuff but I do want to feel at least that I have some ownership. And that is not the case at this time.
Well, if you want to have ownership of any software you better ask someone to program it for you because most software for us consumers is just licensed. I don’t know who started this mess, but it has been like this for ages.
I guess the problem with non-transferrable Windows licenses is that if it was allowed, the whole system falls apart. Since there are no naked PCs there is no point in transferring a Windows license.
BTW, and contradicting my above sentence, it is possible to make naked PCs. Just buy the parts yourself. Of course, nobody is doing that.
Of course, nobody mentioned transferring licenses before. It is a new twist to the story.
One thing to consider is also the price one pays for Windows. As has been stated, an OEM license costs maybe 40 to 50 bucks. That is probably what brought Windows to its market share. When you go out and buy a copy of Windows it costs much more. I don’t like the whole licensing deal myself, but I wonder how things would be if everyone had to pay the full price on Windows. MS is abusing its monopoly, for sure (or has been, at least). But they could have raised the price of Windows a lot more. Also consider all the stuff that comes with Windows nowadays. If OEMs stopped putting an OEM license on their machines, I really wonder if that was in the interest of consumers.
I also don’t like this licensing issues on the software products, and it is ok to say something against this. But the stupid to say “Why Microsoft do this”. As is the case for many other issues, software licenses and the rules don’t change when it comes to Microsoft. The most disturbing license issue comes with Oracle. You have to pay Oracle guys for using the software. You continue to pay them, even you have paid lots of money already.
You can be a jerk and pretend that only Microsoft has some strange rules, or you can understand the fundemental issue and talk against that in general.
I don’t know if you meant me or someone else, but I really don’t need anyone to tell me what I can talk about. I can talk about Microsoft and their licenses as long as I want.
In this discussion I do not care what Oracle does or does not do. It has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft’s licensing practices. I have tried to be the voice of reasoning and bring up some different points of view. This has not been appreciated.
Since it is impossible to have any sort of dialogue on this board without someone throwing words like “jerk” around, I will not indulge into this fruitless endeavour any longer.
Have a good day.
I was talking about you, and I don’t know why you thought I meant you.
But I am against particularly targeting Microsoft for a widespread practice. If you are targeting Microsoft and critizing Microsoft for doing somethin that is done in the whole industry, then yes, I am talking about you. I didn’t mean you actually, but in general I can not understand any mindset particularly isolating Microsoft and claiming that their practices are not acceptable. That has no meaning, because what it means is that, only Microsoft can not use this practice, but Adobe, Apple, Sun, Oracle can use it. This is meaningless.
Anyway I was not talking particularly about you. But the term “jerk” is used for people who are knowingly only target Microsoft, even though they know the fact that everybody uses the same practices. I believe this is a legitimate use of “jerk”. Please be calm, and try to understand what I say and defend.
rajan had me confused
You never did reply to my question. And never said anything about money.
Which is if you trash a PC you cannot transfer the old liscence onto the replacement.
It has nothing to do with the site liscence being an upgrade.
>> You are forgetting the Amiga. Its gaming capabilities
>> (OCS chipset form 1985) were around 7 years ahead
>> compared to competitors
> These were 2D games, not 3D games like Quake or Half-
> Life.
The Amiga was a ground breaking product with regard to 3D gaming just as much as for instance Voodoo graphics cards were over a decade later. Of course Quake and Half-Life didn’t exist yet, but with for instance the first Virtual Reality games (powered by Amigas!) like Dactyl Nightmare, 4 players could fight eachother and co-operate in a 3D arena. As a first person perspective (real 3D) shooter in combination with options like “Capture the Flag” it is without a doubt an important forerunner to Doom, Quake and Half-life. Even years when Commodore was already bankrupt Amigas were still continued to be used for 3D BattleMech arcade VR Pods!
When I played 3D games like Trex Warrior or even Stunt Car Racer during the late-eighties there was nothing remotely interesting available for the PC with regard to 3D gaming.
Also note that the Amiga was unique with regard to its 3D capabilities due to its amazingly advanced hardware and OS at the time, while the PC currently just uses 3rd party off the shelf 3D chipsets which can also be used with Amiga, Macs or whatever other computing system.
CDN: Of course, nobody mentioned transferring licenses before. It is a new twist to the story.
Uhmm, I mentioned this earlier.
Richard James: Which is if you trash a PC you cannot transfer the old liscence onto the replacement.
Firstly, if you have 150 PCs trashed within 2 years, god only knows how the company managed to survive.
Now read CDN’s and Sergio’s posts.
The site license thingy is an UPGRADE! If I have a naked PC, can I go to the store, buy an Upgrade box for Windows XP and demand that I don’t have to pay for Windows two times?
Now, say the first 50 PCs came with Windows 2000. A month later, Microsoft release Windows XP. The 50 PCs get to use Windows XP, cause the site license allows that. Now a year later, another 100 PCs would be bought. Now Microsoft 6 months later releases XP2, the machines can get to upgrade.
Read about the site licensing.
What happen to the old debate? There was no bickering on who said this and who said that and who you meant it to etc, 🙂
Mike Bouma: Of course Quake and Half-Life didn’t exist yet, but with for instance the first Virtual Reality games (powered by Amigas!) like Dactyl Nightmare, 4 players could fight eachother and co-operate in a 3D arena.
If these games can be considered 3D, then I would consider COmmand and Conquer and Sim City 3D. 3D isn’t multiplayer. The games you mention uses Pseudo-3D, which uses graphics to make you think it is 3D. With games like Quake, the actually calculations are done by the game via the GPU. Back then, even with Amiga, the hardware wasn’t that powerful to do these kind of pure calculations.
Each graphic is a 3D game is made out of little poligons, and calculating it was quite impossible with the clock speed back then, even if there were just the processor calculating this.
Amiga was the pinacle of gaming back then, no doubt. 🙂
Besides, without Microsoft, the 3D industry wouldn’t be where it is now. Without Microsoft, the market would be owned by 3Dlabs and 3dfx, two companies that don’t believe in consistent time frames for releases. As a result of which, companies didn’t push to be the best with the most amount of features as the fastest.
BTW, this is my last post in this topic. Want to kick my butt or anything, email me.
> If these games can be considered 3D, then I would
> consider COmmand and Conquer and Sim City 3D. 3D isn’t
> multiplayer.
Believe me Dactyl Nightmare was 100% a 3D game. This game was just like Amiga Flight simulators 100% fully 3D. (unlike DOOM for instance) Of course at the time they still lacked advanced texture mapping and lighting effects.
http://amiga.emugaming.com/virtuality.html
In fact I was pretty amazed to hear that the US military still has Amiga flight simulators in use today for training purposes!
> With games like Quake, the actually calculations are
> done by the game via the GPU. Back then, even with
> Amiga, the hardware wasn’t that powerful to do these
> kind of pure calculations.
At the time not like Quake but many of these Amiga 3D games offered true poligons based calculated 3D environments. And BTW you can even run Quake pretty well on a 50 Mhz AGA/060 classic Amiga.
> Besides, without Microsoft, the 3D industry wouldn’t be
> where it is now.
IMO the real pioneers and innovators with regard to modern 3D gaming were companies like SEGA, Sony, 3DFX, Virtuality and even Amiga.
Mike read some recent articles (I think you may find it Slashdot) regarding the rise of Nvidia. There you will see what Rajan is talking about. You may also find in Salon or Wired.
Also, Microsoft’s Direct3D is awesome and allowed many companies to develop kick-ass games. Moreover Microsoft is member of OpenGL and it has certain patents on that technology too.
So overall, unless you hate Microsoft, it doesn’t make sense to say “real pioneers and innovators with regard to modern 4D gaming were …., except Microsoft”.
> Also, Microsoft’s Direct3D is awesome and allowed many
> companies to develop kick-ass games.
I agree that Direct3D and other DirectX components are very important to simplify development. In fact for the classic Amiga we have Warp3D which allows Hyperion to port Direct3D based games relatively easily to AmigaOS. Similar technologies will find their way onto the AmigaOS4.x platform.
But a market wide adopted 3D technology like similar ot OpenGL, would have been far better for a competitive 3D gaming market.
Mike I am trying to understand what you are saying, but
Mike I am trying to understand what you are saying, but you overuse and misuse the term competitiveness.
Competitiveness is achieved using the laws. The laws limit certain behaviors for companies to make the market competitive. Under these laws if you turn out to be a monopoly, this is fine. This means that you were so good at what you are doing that, nobody was able to compete with you. As long as you abide by law, nobody can complain about this.
You may say that Microsoft didn’t obey the law, but you need to understand exactly what Microsoft was found being guilty of. It had nothing to do with 3D technologies, so let’s not say that and again go into another discussion.
Direct3D is more market wide adopted 3D technology then openGL. Check out the game developers’ web sites, or games. Most of them are written for direct3d. OpenGL was once very popular and promising. But to make sure that it runs on many platforms, they have killed their competitiveness. 95% of people use PCs with Windows. Furthermore, Microsoft did an excellent job, and they have incorporated the best features to their technology, while openGL did nothing. I have read numerous articles about this issue, you can read too.
Competitiveness is a good thing, but you will hurt consumers if you try to limit the people who do better than others. You can not simply come and say “I want competitiveness, so you can’t do better than this person”. If you do that, then consumers as in Germany will pay the price for having a so called “competitive” market.
In the browser case, this would be a huge price, it will limit other opportunities, for example we wouldn’t have e-commerce, osnews and many other web sites, just to have a competitive browser market, just to make sure that Netscape make great profits from their browsers, and to make sure that Microsoft doesn’t have any browser.
> Mike I am trying to understand what you are saying, but
If an external company not tied to Microsoft Windows would develop DirectX-like technologies for MacOS, Windows or whatever other platform eveyone could benefit from this. By being tied to only Windows, other platforms like Linux, MacOS, Amiga, etc cannot benefit. It would even hurt them if DirectX would become the defacto standard, regardless if maybe their solutions are fundamentally more suited for multi-media software.
Hyperion for instance owns the Warp3D technology and not Amiga Inc themselves. Therefor they could create a Linux, Windows or Mac version as well depending on the consumer demand and profitability.
> You may say that Microsoft didn’t obey the law, but you
> need to understand exactly what Microsoft was found
> being guilty of. It had nothing to do with 3D
> technologies
I didn’t state that DirectX is illegal. I only stated that a market wide adopted dominant standard would have been better for a competitive market.
The 3D discussion is just a side-track started by one of Rajan’s comments.
> Direct3D is more market wide adopted 3D technology then
> openGL.
No it isn’t really anyway adopted *like* OpenGL, because it is solely tied to Microsoft products. Sony, Nintendo and Apple don’t utilize DirectX technologies. On Windows it is a very dominant technology however.
> Microsoft did an excellent job, and they have
> incorporated the best features to their technology,
> while openGL did nothing.
I agree that Microsoft did an excellent job, but you completely fail to see that always and everywhere developments costs need to be covered. Microsoft currently has a monopoly position within the desktop computing market, with DirectX being owned by them there isn’t much of a chance Microsoft would pay for OpenGL something or something similar to DirectX.
If you had read all my postings carefully you should understand by now that I am not against software bundling, not against companies making enormous amounts of money but I am agianst using one market to enter or take control of other healthy 3rd party markets.
> for example we wouldn’t have e-commerce, osnews and many
> other web sites
Why could you NOT use e-commerce, osnews and many other websites on a 3rd party developed browser? Microsoft did not invent the internet nor did it invent the webbrowser.
Mr. Bouma is here to discuss Amiga. He has no intention of talking about the topic at hand. He has not said one word about naked pcs in over 30 comments. If you are reading his comments thinking that you will gain an insight into the issue of naked pcs you are wasting your time. Actually Mr. Bouma is wasting OUR time. There are AMIGA posts elsewhere on this wonderful board.
I am not the moderator but I do not like to have to wade through your
answers only to find that once again you have not mentioned the topic ONE time.
I was merely replying to certain comments and everyone else is free to comment themselves as well. Counter comments have lead to other counter comments and so forth.
It is true that I often use the Amiga market as an example as I regard it as a competitive market and AmigaOS as a well designed modular operating system.
This *discussion*, although not always on topic should IMO never be dictated or censured without for instance usage of abusive language (as some tend to do).
No, your posting for example is neither on topic or a tribute to any discussion. But still I don’t think your posting should be deleted.
I work in the IT department of a private not for profit agency and obtain charity licenses from Microsoft. The way our contract with microsoft licensing is set up, we pay a fee for individual CAL’s on our domain. I don’t believe that this is meant to apply to people who use windows (insert flavor here) in a networked environment since you must have a Valid CAL on your server for as many workstations that are on the domain. So using a standard image in a network environment would not affect licensing since you have to purchase CAL’s anyway. We also purchase individual licenses for field pc’s that are not on the network, it does not profit us to have our PC supplier to sell us naked systems because the savings to us is about the same price that we obtain our licenses for. I think the real reason is Microsoft wants naked pc sales reported is to keep tabs on Wal-Mart and what they are doing with their new $199 budget pc’s with linux on them. They’re not saying that it’s illegal to sell naked pc’s, but they would like thier buisness partners to report to them how many pc’s are being sold sans operating system. This could give the bean counters in Redmond a better way to find our how much market share they are losing to alternate OS’s. And their doing it through the EULA so they can make a more solid claim as to why their buisness partners should report to them. It is a move being made by a buisness that is afraid of losing market share. Should they be afraid? Yes, anyone that is not afraid (of anything) is a fool. Fear keeps you on edge and keeps you on top. Even the most battle hardend soldier is afraid in a war. Fear keeps you alive. And that’s what Microsoft is doing, making sure that they are still around in the years to come, because it could be very easy for someone to upset them right now and they need to protect their assets. Is it goiong to be a pain to the honest consumer? In most cases, no. The licences of your Windows 98 computer is transferable, so as long as you can install 98 on your new hard drive you can upgrade it with an upgrade license. So for the normal person upgrading, this does not apply to you. Would everyone in the room that bought a new Dell, Gateway, IBM or Compaq in this message board without an operating system on it please raise their hand. No matter what operating system you installed on it you had to purchase a full version first before you upgrade, if you can upgrade a linux distro without a full version installed first please let me know how. This is what Microsoft is requiring of it’s end users. If you’ve purchased a PC without an operating system on it do the right thing and purchase a license for it, you can still use an image that you created with Ghost or Disk Image, but purchase a new license not just an upgrade licences.