A couple of days ago I posted a link to Ed Bott's blog in which he pointed a finger at a very worrisome aspect of Windows Vista's licensing that had a lot of people in a tizzy. It seemed to imply that you couldn't move a copy of Vista more than once from a given machine. I didn't like the sound of that, but at the same time I could see how it was a misreading of a statement that wasn't very well-worded to begin with. I slept on it, re-read it, and saw all the more how it could have been misread.
Now Paul Thurott has attempted to explain everything. He claims the the contractual conditions in the new EULA are really no different from what they were in XP -- and that, in XP, we didn't really have the freedom to move licenses as freely as we thought we did. Well, did we? His claim is that the vast majority of XP licenses are not over-the-counter boxed editions, but preinstalls tied to a given machine. The people who do have a machine failure and need to move to a whole new machine have always had the option of activating by phone (which I've done myself as a pre-emptive measure at one point).
His defense of this whole matter boils down to two things:
1) Most people who get Vista will get it with a new computer, which cannot be transferred anyway.
2) If you buy Vista over-the-counter and need to move it more than once, you do what you did with XP: call support.
(For the record, I have one friend who did exactly that and claims he was treated with great hostility and suspicion, but I wonder how much of that may simply have been that they were simply asking him what had happened, and he felt like he had to provide them with every last detail, which is generally not the case. My point being that few people are inclined to phone tech support to do something they feel should be a hands-off circumstance.)
However, let me play devil's advocate for the moment. The number of times I have had to move a given copy of Windows to a completely different computer I could probably count on one hand. Notice I said move and not reinstall; the two are not handled the same way. If you reinstall Windows on a piece of hardware that it was already activated on (including incremental changes, remember the 120-day device-change threshold?), that's not moving anything.
So how does this affect the hardcore PC geeks who tear down and rebuild constantly? Thurrott further claims the algorithm in Vista that determines the number of hardware changes to watch for to consider the machine different has actually been relaxed a bit. I don't have details on how it's been relaxed; I'd like to scare those up as soon as possible and see for my self what they are.
I should also note that the people who object to all of this on principle -- I was and to a degree still am one of them myself -- are simply not going to be most of the people using Windows, and are not going to use Windows in the ways that most other folks are. I think we forget this a little too easily, and while it's good to remain vigilant of changes like this, it's not good to lose perspective. We don't like restrictive licensing agreements because many of us have tasted life on the other side of the Windows fence, but unless someone can go and prove in court that EULAs like this are not legal, or constitute an abuse of monopoly, we either use Windows as it is or not at all.
My complaint is this: If the XP EULA didn't allow moving from more than one machine, why didn't it say that in the first place? Perhaps I'm griping needlessly at this point, but I'm finding I miss the days of Borland's old-school software licenses (the kind that came with products like Turbo Pascal), which were spelled out in the clearest and most unambiguous language possible and came with plenty of examples. I'm frankly more worried about WGA being an inhibitor to Vista's usefulness than the EULA, but this is certainly not helping matters any.
I'll see how much of an obstacle Product Activation and WGA are with my own hardware. I would like to think it won't be any worse than it is now, but ... I worry. A bit.
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