LIVE TODAY: Windows 8 licensing - Speak your brains, believe your eyes
Taking a snow day today? You might want to join your fellow Reg readers in assessing what Windows 8 actually costs. We don’t mean in the sense of estimating the financial fallout of poor Q4 sales for Microsoft and the PC makers, but rather: what do you get for your money? Putting Metro aside and forgetting the fact you must buy …
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Again, it depends on your use case. For a creative workstation I can see it being a right pain in the behind. For most home users who surf, email and use IM then it makes sense on a tablet machine. On a laptop or desktop less so.
And
an eternity of fiddling to get it to work like your last version did, only to discover that some of your programs wont run at all.
What does Windows 8 cost?
A lifetime of bile and attacks from Eadon if you install it!
Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
The risks of using windows are legal as well as financial. The same is true of most proprietary software, so this argument is more of an argument for open source than a windows specific issue.
However, there might be some windows-specific death traps in there.
Essentially one of the things these licences say, "you do not own the operating system, you merely rent it". Personally, I don't like renting my computers and software, I prefer to own them, and open source licences such as GPL do say that we own the open source software that we use.
There may be a constraint that says, if you change the software and then distribute it, then you are obliged to also distribute the changes if requested. But that's necessary to keep the software changes in the public domain to benefit everyone. It is why Linux won compared to BSD.
Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
"It is why Linux won compared to BSD."
Are you sure on that? I don't think it's that cut and dried.
You might want to rethink that.
Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
"It is why Linux won compared to BSD."
Take Apple, they took the Mach kernel and used it for OSX and iOS. The licence for that software did not require Apple to contribute back the changes they made to it, so therefore it benefits Apple but no one else.
Ditto with the BSD distros. Corporations may use it but they don't give back their changes, so it does not evolve so well.
Of course corporations can change Linux kernels and not give back changes, we all have that freedom. However, often those corporations want to distribute their Linux distros containing those changes, so the changes do get given back for the greater good.
A good example is Android, - Google are contributing code to the Linux kernel, everyone benefits from the actions of a corporation that is as selfish as any other publicly traded corporation. (They care about shareholder value, basically, under the Law they are obliged to.)
Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
"Take Apple, they took the Mach kernel and used it for OSX and iOS. The licence for that software did not require Apple to contribute back the changes they made to it, so therefore it benefits Apple but no one else."
Sure, it doesn't require them to contribute back the changes... but they did anyway.
See http://opensource.apple.com/ and http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2050.18.24/ in particular, the kernel from OSX 10.8.2.
And you just made me defend Apple; I can't believe it.
Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
@Jordan Davenport - yes that's true but only after Apple were shamed after a massive PR disaster for not sharing what they took and made countless billions from. But if it were not for the negative publicity they wouldn't have bothered.
Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.
Nope Eadon is correct, companies using open source, do often put new code in, Microsoft for example put's quite a lot of code into Linux and also runs it's own open source site.
Granted a lot is self serving, but so is much of android.
Sorry didn't you know that Eadon?
Serious question
Does using a licensed copy of Windows 8 permit FACT to do a software license audit raid on your home and office?
Re: Serious question
@Flocke Kroes - You can bet good folding money upon it!
A risk of using Windows is that you can be audited. If, however, auditors do show up, do not let them in. They have no legal rights to enter your premises without permission, they're not the police.
Better still, use Linux and be as free from legal risk as you can be.
Re: Serious question
"Better still, use Linux and be as free from legal risk as you can be."
I use a Linux distribution on all of my personal computers as my primary or even only operating system, but in any country which recognizes software patents, using properly licensed proprietary software most often puts you at the least legal risk.
Linux may very well be open-source, but the kernel itself supposedly violates approximately 200 Microsoft patents which they refuse to disclose openly. That alone will unfortunately put you at the wrong end of the gun barrel from Microsoft's legal team, particularly if you use it in any large-scale business. Do I agree with that situation? Not at all - I personally think software should be protected by copyright and trade secrets alone, given its mathematical and even literary nature, but the world at large seems to disagree.
Now, the maintainers of certain distributions actually do pay licensing fees for others to use the software contained within the distribution as shipped, such as Canonical with Ubuntu (at least regarding certain technologies such as MP3 decoding and playback). Those licenses extend only to the packages as shipped in the official distributions however and not to any packages which may lie in various repositories, officially supported (in the case of Medibuntu) or not.
While your personal ethics may permit you to break patent law, do remember that you are still by definition breaking the law and are as such at legal risk. If you do however live in a country which does not respect software patents, then sure, using Linux may put you at less legal risk. You have to do your own homework on that though.
Re: Serious question
Microsoft were spreading "Linux violates our patents" FUD. But they never said what the patents were, which, legally and ethically, does not look good for MS.
If MS did go after Linux again (they sponsored the SCO legal attacks on Linux) then the bad PR they would get from it would be volcanic. And the Linux guys would doubtless route around the patents anyway.
But this is a good example of the insanity of software patents, software should never be patented.
Legal risks of using Linux?
"Microsoft tried to auction off some patents that they claim relate to Linux"
Re: Serious question
"...approximately 200 Microsoft patents which they refuse to disclose openly..."
www.USPTO.gov
Admittedly, perhaps more in theory than in practice.
"What does Windows 8 cost?" -- The respect of your IT colleges.
Another day, another win 8 hater story on the reg
"I don’t mean in the sense of what’s the fallout of poor Q4 sales for Microsoft and the PC makers"
Really? <sigh>
Re: Another day, another win 8 hater story on the reg
It hardly seems like a Win 8 'hater' story, as you incorrectly label it.
It seems to be a fairly serious opportunity to get some information on Windows 8 licensing. If it needs labeling beyond it's headline, as you seem to insist, that would be closer to a Win 8 'lover' story, surely.
New PC?
"Putting Metro aside and forgetting the fact you must buy a brand new PC"
What does this even mean? I've in-place upgraded on 3 different PCs (one a tabet) without any issues.
Re: New PC?
Ever thought of attending the Windows Anonymous self-help group? Poor devil!
Anyone else see the huge warning sign that is a licensing regime so convoluted that you need a boot camp to understand it?
Nothing to do with the licencing aspect but.....
if they had actually hadn't put as much effort into removing random features, (partially in most circumstances), as they did in making the underlying kernel quite good, we wouldn't be having this discussion. UI now sucks Satan's plumbs for most users - and MS know it - however the actual o/s in general is actually quite good.
add extension to windows explorer datail columns and to windows 7, you cannot rename file descriptions with ease, and every file saying winamp media file is bollox, to right click and open in soundforge or other editors
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