Ultra-confusing Microsoft licensing

Posted by Vic Laurie
June 8, 2007

Greetings from the forests of western Michigan. Ed Bott has a post on Microsoft’s licensing mess that I want to pass along. I have often complained about how Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make its licensing as confusing as possible. Microsoft has a very large legal staff and they seem to work overtime at obfuscation of the licensing terms. As Bott says:

If you’ve been selling a product for more than 10 years and you’ve shipped hundreds of millions of units, you’d think your customers would know what they’re buying. For Microsoft, that’s not the case.

The culprit is the hopelessly confusing, practically Byzantine Windows licensing structure, which consists of a maze of terms and conditions that define (and ultimately restrict) what you can do with Microsoft Windows in your home or business. Worse still, the license terms are only partially aligned with the activation and validation tools that are supposed to ensure that your copy of Windows is “genuine.” If you fill a room with 10 PCs, each running an apparently identical version of Windows, there’s no easy way to tell what kind of license restrictions apply to each one - or, indeed, whether any or all of those PCs are properly licensed.

Computer management

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