14 Microsoft Vista's new EULA
Tuesday 31st October, 2006
The Register has an interesting analysis of the Microsoft Vista End-User License Agreement.
Among the gems in this agreement, which virtually everyone agrees to without reading it, are:
- If you use Vista, you may run performance benchmarks on the operating system, but you may not disclose the results of the benchmarks without permission. Censorship - that's one way to prevent bad news getting out!
- You may not run the software on a virtual system (such as the Windows XP honeypot PC I mentioned in an earlier post) unless you have purchased the more expensive Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate "editions". The differences between the "editions" is going to be interesting. Aside from the cost that is. One wonders what has been disabled, and how soon "fixes" to enable the disabled funtionality appears.
- You may not use the license on more than two PCs. So, build one PC, install Vista. Build another, transfer Vista to the new PC. And that's your lot. If you want to legitimately transfer the license to a third PC, you can't; you must shell out for another full license. I imagine that corporate customers will have a special dispensation to get around this one, but Joe Public can forget it.
There's a lively comments section about this very subject on OSNews.com.