With Windows 8 right around the corner, the usual game of reading the end-user license agreements and spotting the different versions is in full swing. Usually, this is a game of ridicule as Microsoft comes up with ever more convoluted version schemes and EULA terms. This time around, though, the company seems to be taking steps to make things easier, as Ed Bott reports.
Windows 7 could be acquired in four different ways, each with their own license. If you had a previous version of Windows, you could buy an upgrade. If you needed a new computer, you could buy one and get Windows 7 pre-installed. For OEMs and system builders, there was the OEM version, and, of course, you could always buy a full retail copy.
If you built your own computer – something many OSAlert readers do, I’m assuming – you technically had to buy the full retail version of Windows. Of course, you didn’t actually do so; virtually every online retailer also offered the OEM version to regular consumers, even though this technically wasn’t allowed. These were much cheaper than the retail versions.
Microsoft has now decided to address this issue. The four consumer-facing license types – upgrade, pre-installed, system builder, full retail – will be consolidated into three, by combining the system builder and full retail licenses into one license: the Personal Use License for System Builder, which finally officially and legally brings OEM licenses to individual consumers. It can also be used for virtual machines.
On top of all this, Microsoft has also simplified the licenses themselves. They’re now all divided into two parts; the first part is a human readable version of the license in QA-format, and the second part is the full-on legalese version. This should definitely make it easier to understand EULAs, which might not be relevant for simple home use, but for someone like me, who runs his own one-man business, I suddenly have to start paying attention to this stuff.
The other important part, pricing, is still a bit murky, but is getting clearer as more information trickles out. We know there’s going to be a $40 upgrade offer for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 users, which is the version most of us will be buying (one for my ZenBook, please). The full boxed version of Windows 8 Pro will have promotional pricing of $70 (which will jump to $200 once the offer runs out late January). How much the Personal Use version will cost, we don’t yet know (I’ll be buying one, though).
Why am I buying one? Well, because, despite the issues Metro has on non-touch devices, I believe it has potential. I’m very curious to see what happens when smart developers get their hands on this and work within Metro’s constraints to make beautiful applications. Despite the obvious limitations of iOS and Android (which has less limitations, but still), developers have been able to make very useful and impressive applications.
Let’s see what the future has in store for Windows 8 and Metro. I’m curious, because Microsoft’s future depends on it.
Where is the full text of the EULA though? I didn’t actually find it in the link.
Until General Availability on October 26, you’ll probably need to be in possession of an RTM build or be part of the MS Partner Network to see the EULAs.
At some point, however, they should be posted here:
http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/intellectualproperty/use…
Thom, you are a perpetual Windows optimist.
Yes, considering “smart developers” will ignore Win8 on the Desktop when it comes to Metro.
Of course, “smart developers” might ignore Metro altogether if they believe Win8/Metro won’t be any kind of market for mobile, which is very likely.
Of course, back in the real world, WP appstore is already one of the few most lively and vigorous – despite quite low installed user base up to now / pre-WP8 push…
Edited 2012-08-28 20:20 UTC
The software is licensed, not sold. Under this agreement,
This in effect destroys “fair use” as earlier Supreme Court rulings stated that you did buy and own the software.
Sounds rather lame too. It can’t destroy courts ruling. EULA can claim that MS owns the Moon or what not. If it goes against the law – it’s void.
Edited 2012-08-22 03:49 UTC
To be precise: only the clauses that are in violation of existing laws are void, not the whole EULA, ie. the parts the are covered by e.g. copyright laws are still valid.
Here in Finland marketing laws basically say that if you sell something like a shelf product then it is a shelf product, regardless of what the license or the box says, ie. “if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck.” This also covers things like selling a used product: as long as you give all the needed materials to the new owner and remove all backups from your possession you’re free to sell the item even if the EULA tried to prevent you from doing that.
WereCatf,
That sounds good in principal. It makes sense to void prohibitions against after-sale license transfers, but what about DRM? The law is pretty useless if technology actively interferes with a user’s right to transfer.
It’s probably not illegal to reverse-engineer DRM in Finland. I may be wrong though; all the information I could find is quite old and a lot could happen in 4 years.
rikkirakk,
“It’s probably not illegal to reverse-engineer DRM in Finland.”
It’s probably legal to reverse engineer the software in many places, even the DMCA offers some rights in that direction.
However I still can’t help but feel that it’s wrong for companies to prohibit legal rights through technological means, which is what DRM does. The (in)effectiveness of DRM doesn’t really enter into the equation for me. It’s not safe to assume DRM will ALWAYS remain ineffective.
From a CS perspective, It is impossible to implement foolproof DRM on open consumer hardware since the outer layer of DRM code is always inherently exposed; this is true even of the operating system. DRM is ineffective because corporations have not been successful at enforcing their control over the full stack – including hardware. However the powers that be are making headway in pushing the entire industry towards closed platforms where the hardware itself will be capable of banning end user modification.
On such platforms, the DRM will no longer be inherently vulnerable to software hacks, only hardware ones. Ultimately the DRM will still get broken even if it requires hardware hacks, but since users no longer have the capability of running unapproved software on their own machines they won’t be able to circumvent the DRM without a hardware hack (consider xbox mods).
Not in isolation… but the real world isn’t like that, we have networked hw for example (so, speaking in a kind of thermodynamic terminology: not a closed system; strange thing can happen due to external interactions)
Diablo 3 DRM seems to be doing quite fine… (and I’m prety certain their server farm uses fairly standard open hw, sort of consumer one in a broader sense of the word – “just” under guard)
Besides, “foolproof” is not even really a goal – only good enough… (I guess Sony is quite glad with how long the PS3 held out – fell to some stupid omission IIRC, they’ll try harder next time I’m sure, plus, Sony bought Gaikai for some reason… and with increasing sophistication of ICs, smaller processes, it will be ever more pesky)
In Finland you are allowed to crack DRM but only to access media/software/whatever you bought. It’s illegal to do so for any kind of copying including backups. Also it’s illegal to distribute any instructions or software to circumvent DRM. And last but not least you are prohibited from discussing circumventing DRM in an “organized manner”. It has been hinted that this might include internet forums.
Of course since the new law was passed only recently (2006 to be precise) it has yet to be tested in court.
There are no laws against owning the Moon by MS, by private or commercial entities in general… (the treaty is only about govs)
And, as we all surely know, the Moon is claimed (after he bought one of the Lunokhods) by Lord British. Ultimately, it’s only a matter of the right price, I guess …or an EULA in which Lord British wilfully enters.
Edited 2012-08-28 23:36 UTC
Is license transfer prohibited? Because even if it states that it’s licensed, you still acquire(buy) the license.
In most European countries the EULA is meaningless, regardless of what software vendors want you to believe.
Do you know what it is in the US? Is the EULA fully enforceable in the US?
An eula could be very enforceable. Companies are required to comply with them. A common home user may not care. A company that could get sued or fined would care.
In other words, you’re participating in spreading FUD. Yes “could get sued” – but there are a lot of frivolous & quickly throw own lawsuits around, being sued doesn’t mean anything in itself.
No entity (company or not) is required to comply with license clauses that are contrary to the laws of the country…
You could actually just buy the box to get the discount, and not install it until you’ve seen it in action on other machines or until a service pack or a few bug fixes have been released. That’s what I expect I’ll do. I don’t want to install a radically new version of Windows until I know what the implications for me as a developer are.
Hmm… I wonder if this will give to many a false sense of security as they will probably stop reading after the Q&A section.
(yes, I trust MS-lawyers are more skilled than their engineers
)
You know, IBM – which is among the most notable contributors of code to Linux – has probably one of the best lawyers in the industry…
By the way… seems they removed the Enterprise edition ?
Great! Now most companies will have to go for the full Datacenter edition at >4000$….
No, they did not remove the enterprise edition.
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/0…
that link explains the editions of Windows 8, and at the bottom, specifically addresses your concerns about the Enterprise Edition.
It took about 6 seconds to google that…
Sorry, I read this the other day
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-edi…
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-goes-public-with-windows-server-2012…
and then I read Windows 8 here and I thought about Windows 2012 Server.
No reason to apologize, I was trying to make a point, but it came out too harsh.
I felt kind of lucky to have bought some of the Windows 7 upgrades for $40 or so when they were offered. I failed that risk with windows ME. (that sucked)
This windows 8 is just not productive. I’ll keep xp or windows 7 until either I die or Windows 8 dies.
Microsoft can always shutdown the authentication servers…
Sure they could, but then you’ll just have people cracking it with programs such as Windows Loader (not all that different from how things stand now). Businesses with corporate licenses will likely be unaffected anyway as a proper vlk doesn’t require activation at least for XP. What they could do that would have a much worse impact is shut down the update servers for those versions of Windows instead. Oops, probably shouldn’t give them ideas.
Actually, for a business I recently specifically bought retail versions of Windows 7 instead of OEM. So that Windows 7 can more easily be transfered to newer/better hardware when the old hardware breaks. So they can still use it many years from now.
I see no reason for them to run Windows 8 any time soon or in the long run for that matter.
I have to ask this. I mean why would they really care? I know of NO companies that are crazy enough to update all their workstations every Operating System release. We’re just barely moving most of the workstations over to 7. Vista was a total crapshoot and we don’t even support it for our clients.
I don’t see Windows 8 being all that used in the corporate environment, regardless of what Microsoft wants.
Besides, as far as I know, the EULAs have NEVER stood up in court, anywhere. GPL has because it’s a copyright rather than just a license.
leech,
“Besides, as far as I know, the EULAs have NEVER stood up in court, anywhere. GPL has because it’s a copyright rather than just a license.”
I’m not following your distinction? “License” is right there in the GPL acronym.
Take a look at this case as it may be a counter-example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD,_Inc._v._Zeidenberg
I find this ruling disappointing for various reasons. One of which is that phone directories are not supposed to be copyrightable. The judge ignored this and essentially concluded the EULA trumps copyright law. There wasn’t even a formal contract in place, just a damned clickwrap license. I’d write this one up to a seriously bad judge, but it has established a precedent. It proves that with the “right” judge, you can get any ruling you want.
What I find despicable with “clickwrap” licenses generally is:
1) they aren’t explicitly available at the time of purchase
2) you have to “agree” to them before you can see the product
3) Opened software typically is not accepted for return if one doesn’t agree with the EULA. It’s notoriously difficult.
For example, Dell’s return policy is:
“We accept returns of software for refund or credit only if the package containing the disks is sealed and unopened.”
Clickwrap licensing is a scam.
Well, I did say it isn’t “just a license.” Meaning that while it is a license agreement, it’s also a copyright agreement.
It states that the copyright holders are indeed the authors of the source code and to be able to change the license, you would have to get all of the contributors to the source code to agree.
Am I glad I don’t use Windows! I can’t imagine wasting time on decoding MS licensing schemes every release.
A big contrast. People can start using GPL software without even having to read the GPL.
“You are not required to agree to anything to merely use software which is licensed under the GPL. You only have obligations if you modify or distribute the software.”
— https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html
Edited 2012-08-23 07:51 UTC
You’d spend less time doing that than you would dealing with the constant breakage in linux. Assuming you’re a linux user of course.
Normally I wouldn’t feed the troll, but figured I will because it’s early enough…
Linux is creaming Windows in the server space because it breaks all the time.
I’ve had an Arch Linux (yup, that’s right, a rolling release) running on my desktop for the last 4 years without a reinstall.
Yet Windows Server 2003 will sometimes randomly remove an active directory account. Did it to the manager once, was pretty funny.
There is no constant breakage in linux,, windows crashes a lot lot lot more often
Never ever used less time on caring for my OS then after switching to linux.
Not counting the first half year I was using it though.. there was contstant breakage yes.., but NOT because of linux
Linux is pretty buff, and extremely stable.
Less resource demanding, more stable and less costly than whatever comes with the windows NT kernel.
Windows is a dinosaur, and I hope it dies soon.
Snap out of the last century, with its then-popular crashy win9x line (oh, and let’s not forget how Linux was also more… “fun” back then)
Hope all you want, but the still significant growth in PC numbers is fuelled almost exclusively by Windows PCs. Which for the majority of normal users might very well be a less costly solution (including time invested, familiarity) – and people hardly pay for Windows anyway, it comes installed on a new machine (with low-priced OEM license), and they usually use the version it came with until that machine breaks down. Also, any PC sold for quite a few years is powerful enough so that any hypothetical “less resource demanding” (which necessitates tinkering and/or going with more niche, less polished distros & DEs) doesn’t matter.
(and that doesn’t even touches how some software categories – NLE for example – are very nice on Windows and quite rubbish on Linux…)
Did you really delude yourself into thinking that any significant number of people bothers?
And I wonder if you go through all revisions of OSS licenses, before using any software that uses them…
Edited 2012-08-28 23:43 UTC