The XMEN Clan Forums

Lovely little article at the Register about how MS is going to make their OS licensing scheme more fun for everyone and more profitable for themselves. The last link in the article (regarding satirists) is pretty amusing.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24 ... in_cactus/

In short, there are two ways to get a valid OS license: Buy the retail box, or buy an OEM PC with Windoze preinstalled. If you choose the latter, and ditch the PC, you are legally required to ditch the OS as well. No doubt an attempt to slam shut the door on grey-market "oem" copies floating about, and with their policy of "only valid users get updates" it might work.

Or it might drive people to Linux. We can hope.

The retail box and OEM copies have been the way MS has done their licenses for quite a while now. The part about the ditching the machine and being required to ditch the OS... now that's new.

Could be some interesting legal ramifications from that as well. I'm very, very fuzzy on the concept, but wasn't there a law against that kind of package deal put into effect sometime this century? I mean, the hardware and the software are from two separate companies; how can one be required to link the personal sale of them together? If it were a company reselling those machines and OEM licenses (which does happen), I can see the requirement making sense. But from what I read, it seems MS wants this to apply to personal selling of the machine as well, and I don't see how they can make that stick.