Ben Finney wrote:
Steve Dower steve.do...@microsoft.com writes:
Ben Finney wrote:
The restrictions of the license terms make MS Windows an
unacceptable risk on any machine I'm responsible for.
Just out of interest, which restrictions would those be?
It has been a long time since I bothered to read any of the numerous license
texts from Microsoft, so I can't cite specific clauses. From memory,
unacceptable restrictions include:
* Restricting the instance to specific hardware, instead of leaving it
up to the recipient to run the work they paid for on any hardware they
choose.
If by specific hardware you mean the one-license-per-user-per-machine rule,
you probably want to consider Windows Server, which has a more flexible license
in this respect (or maybe not - it might just allow multiple users on one
license/machine. I haven't checked this).
* Forbidding reverse-engineering of the OS to see how it behaves.
Yeah, I doubt that restriction is moving anywhere. It's standard for
closed-source software, and as I understand it's intended to legally protect
trade secrets and patents (i.e. we tried our hardest to keep this a trade
secret). I've never heard of anyone being pursued for doing it though, except
to be offered a job working on Windows :)
* Forbidding collaboration with other recipients to discover how the OS
behaves.
Other recipients are explicitly excluded - for use by one person at a
time[1] - so the rest of this point doesn't really make any sense to me.
That said, it does trigger some memories of when I was contributing to ReactOS
years ago... is this one of their suggestions about how to avoid taint? (Or
maybe from Wine?) Those guys have obtained their own legal advice which is
going to be aimed at preventing a court case (not just preventing a loss -
preventing it from happening in the first place) and so it's going to be based
on an interpretation of the license and be more defensive than most people need
to worry about.
* Refusal to disclose the source code for the running OS to the
recipient.
Again, it's part of the business and legal model. If you really want access to
the source code, you can pay for it, but most people and businesses can't
afford it or don't want it that badly. (There are also technical reasons why
the source code can't easily be disclosed - how many hundreds of gigabytes of
code are you willing to download and wade through? Yes, it's that big.)
* Forbidding the recipient from getting their choice of vendor to make
improvements to the OS and collaborate with other recipients on the
improvements.
I know this used to exist, as there were a number of RT/embedded OSs available
that were based on Windows. I think at this point they've all been absorbed
into Microsoft though.
* Arrogating control of the running OS to a party other than the license
recipient, including the ability to (at Microsoft's sole discretion)
deny applications to run, and to disable features of the OS.
* Arrogating data collection to Microsoft and undisclosed third parties,
tracking broad classes of activity on the OS and sending the logs to a
server not of the recipient's choosing.
It seems you fundamentally disagree with the 'licensing' model and would prefer
an 'ownership' model. That's fine, but it's not the business model Windows
operates under and that is unlikely to ever change. Even if I were CEO, I'd
have a hard time changing that one :)
Does this prevent you from creating a VM on a cloud provider on your
own account?
If I need to accept restrictions such as the above, I don't see that the
location of the instance (nor the fees charged) has any affect on these
concerns. The risks discussed above are not mitigated.
If the licensing is a real issue, I'm in a position where I can have a
positive impact on fixing it, so any info you can provide me (on- or
off-list) about your concerns is valuable.
Thank you for this offer, I am glad to see willingness expressed to solve
these
restrictions. I hope you can achieve software freedom for all recipients of
Microsoft operating systems.
Until then, the risk is too great to anyone to whom I have professional
responsibilities, and my advice must continue to be that they avoid accepting
such restrictions.
That's a fair enough position, and without people taking that stance, Linux
(and practically every OS that's based on it) wouldn't be anywhere near as
usable as it is today. I'm also fully aware of people with the exact opposite
stance who give the exact opposite advice, so there's room in this world for
all of us.
I'm sorry I can't do any better than the few responses above - these are big
issues that run to the core of how Microsoft does business, and not only am I
incapable of changing them, I'm nowhere near capable of fully understanding how
it all fits together. Thanks for being willing to engage, though. It's always
valuable to hear alternative points of
