So Maybe We Were Panicking After All

I slept on last night's Windows licensing issue, and when I woke up in the morning, I went back and re-read the licensing terms with a clear(er) head.  I have the suspicion that what's going on here is another case of a badly-worded EULA, rather than Microsoft being deadly greedly.

Let's look at that wording again. 

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

I am beginning to suspect what they mean is not that you can only move the license to one other machine, but that you can only move it once from the original machine.  In other words, you can only move it to one other machine from that machine, not five others, with a similar condition imposed on each successive machine.  In short, this is ostensibly no different from the way XP works now; the wording just seems to be a little more prone to misinterpretation.  So maybe this is a tempest in a thermos, to coin a phrase.

What I find amazing is how a company of Microsoft's size and relative wealth can write an EULA that's this fuzzy.  Those who are of a more paranoid stripe would probably be inclined to say that it's on purpose, but I'm starting to learn my lesson about assuming the worst each time.  (There are other elements in the licensing agreement that had people in a tizzy, like a clause which was horribly misquoted and which people believed to mean that you couldn't use an .ISO disc image in anything other than Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.)

I am, however, still going to wait for some official clarification on this issue.

Ed Bott (who brought attention to this the first time) has also chimed in about something else that's actually a giant boon: If you have a copy of Vista, you can run the same copy of Vista within it as a VM with no licensing penalty.  This is a great idea.  For a guy like me, who's constantly using VMs to do testing-and-teardown work, it means one less thing to worry about.  Microsoft actually has done some very good things with the way they've handled licensing for VMs, so it's nice to see them continue to do so on the desktop.