[conspire] installation media

[Peter Knaggs]

Hi Paul,

I also find the Microsoft licenses hard to understand, although I do have
some
simple first-hand experience, and my conclusion regarding running Microsoft
within a virtual machine is that unless I purchased the full retail version
and
used it for only that purpose, it would not be a license-compliant use.

The reason I think this is that the majority of the Microsoft licenses that
I
have received in the past were in the category of OEM licenses, for example
I purchased a machine from an individual on eBay who had purchased an
OEM license and since they subsequently sold the machine to me, it was
valid for me to use the OEM license, but it would not have been valid for
them to use the machine as OEM licenses are only intended for resellers.

I have built a machine specifically for running the Microsoft operating
system, and I found that there was no way for me to avoid purchasing
a full retail Microsoft license, at the time I think it was around $300
for a license for what they called "Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate" and
that specific edition is necessary if you require NFS client access,
making it quite an expensive operating system.

For the machine which I bought from eBay with the OEM license,
since I had to reinstall the operating system for various reasons
(security being the obvious one), I found the "Activation" process
for the Microsoft license to be quite simple as long as the CPU
and motherboard were not swapped out, all that was required
was to allow the machine to connect to the internet, and as long
as I allowed it to contact the activation servers over at Microsoft,
then it would show as activated again after the clean reinstall.

On another machine, where I did run into a problem where
the motherboard failed and needed to be replaced with a
slightly different model as the earlier model was no longer
available, I had to go through a manual system of calling
Microsoft, it took some time to get that one activated,
there were a lot more questions to answer. But I think
that situation would not happen very often.

As far as I understand, Microsoft's OEM license wouldn't
be a good choice for running inside a virtual machine, as
a VM is considered to be a machine you "built yourself"
even though it's not real it's not a machine you plan to
resell to a third party. So for that kind of machine, it seems
that the only valid license is a full retail Microsoft license.

Of course that's only my understanding of the stuff,
I'm continually surprised by how complicated it is to
understand the Microsoft licenses. That's why I tend
to only use them in the most simplistic way possible,
and stick with linux for everything that matters.

Peter.

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 5:52 PM paulz at ieee.org <paulz at ieee.org> wrote:

> Long long ago, we discussed running multiple OS's on one computer.  One
> aspect of the problem was that it is now very rare for a PC to come with
> windows installation media.
>
> I was looking for something else, when I stumbled onto the following
> page.  The way I read it, if the PC already has Win10 installed, you can
> download and create a new media and do a reinstall without paying for a
> license.  If the pc was using Win 8, you would have to pay for a new
> license.
>
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
>
> Now, if I wanted the primary OS to be Linux and then use VMware or (?) to
> run windows, I still might have to pay for the license because the
> environment isn't the same.
>
> I don't expect to do any of this right now, but thought maybe the info
> would be useful.
>
>
>
>
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>
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