[conspire] installation media

[paulz at ieee.org]

Micro$oft licen$e$ are ea$y to under$tand. The rule$ are made tomake the mo$t money for Micro$oft.

    On Sunday, March 22, 2020, 6:23:42 PM PDT, Peter Knaggs <peter.knaggs at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Hi Paul,
I also find the Microsoft licenses hard to understand, although I do have somesimple first-hand experience, and my conclusion regarding running Microsoftwithin a virtual machine is that unless I purchased the full retail version andused 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 Ihave received in the past were in the category of OEM licenses, for exampleI purchased a machine from an individual on eBay who had purchased anOEM license and since they subsequently sold the machine to me, it wasvalid for me to use the OEM license, but it would not have been valid forthem to use the machine as OEM licenses are only intended for resellers.
I have built a machine specifically for running the Microsoft operatingsystem, and I found that there was no way for me to avoid purchasinga full retail Microsoft license, at the time I think it was around $300for a license for what they called "Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate" andthat 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" processfor the Microsoft license to be quite simple as long as the CPUand motherboard were not swapped out, all that was requiredwas 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 wherethe motherboard failed and needed to be replaced with aslightly different model as the earlier model was no longeravailable, 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'tbe a good choice for running inside a virtual machine, asa VM is considered to be a machine you "built yourself"
even though it's not real it's not a machine you plan toresell to a third party. So for that kind of machine, it seemsthat 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 tendto 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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