Sell Your Computers, Keep Paying MS For Licenses

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft Licensing 6.0 requires a company to pay up on software maintenance when the computers that are covered under the license are sold off. Here's the kicker though: MS is no longer obligated to provide maintenance even though the contract is paid up! Read the Infoworld article."

Comments

remember.....

[Lxy]

You don't own software. Software is a contract, and even though you shelled out $x for a piece of software, you are bound to the agreement. Transfering a Windows license is like any other contract.. read it carefully and make sure you're permitted to do so.

I'm not saying that MS is good, quite the contrary. They will rape their customers for as much money as they can, but from a bunsiness standpoint they're just just doing business.

If you don't like it, use linux.

Re:remember.....

[dachshund]

read it carefully and make sure you're permitted to do so.

And if you don't like the terms, suck it up. MS has a monopoly on the desktop, especially in terms of business software. They can put any damned thing they want into their licenses, because most businesses have nowhere else to go.

This story simply helps to illustrate the difference between having a monopoly and abusing one.

Re:remember.....

[Mac Degger]

Yes, correct. But the only reason software is a contract is because we have let it become that. It's still rediculous: it's like the phones of old (at least in parts of europe) which you rented/leased instead of bought.
Personally I want it spelled out to me: do I buy this or do I lease it. And for me, if I go to a store and buy something, without having to sign a piece of paper which I'd read very carefully, I have bought something. No matter what some clickthru EULA says.

Of course, Licence 6.0 is nothing like that. But even so, I'd say that this is a perfect example of MS leveraging their monopoly position for vendor lock-in. due to the fact that it is unfeasable for many companies already running MS to switch to anything else [yeah, it's possible, but only with clear changeover protocols and policies...which these companies might not have]. This can have multiple reasons, from financial (retraining) to time factors (retraining ;) ) and many others. But the end result is that MS gains a lot of extra money for no effort, due to restrictive and amoral licencing which many companies jhust can't get out of.

last two paragraphs in article sums it up...

[emptybody]

..."What microsoft is really doing is saying, 'Hey, just recognize you are truly at our mercy.' "
If you didn't already know that, you just haven't been paying attention.

How many more reasons do companies need to dump Microsoft and go with unix/linux?

Blah blah blah, it's called a contract

[stratjakt]

If I sign a 4 year maintanaince contract with Pedros lawn care, I have to keep paying even if I move and the new owners dont want them running around the yard spraying pesticide.

The same goes with many other maintanaince/support contracts. Dont like it? Do business with someone else.

We have customers who still contractually pay for support on HP big iron boxes that havent been plugged in for years.

Another case of MSFT doing the same thing everyone else does, execpt (heres the kicker!) for some reason it's "evil" because you dont like windows.

Big fat whoop. MS Licensing is a business support contract, and pretty much a standard one at that.

Re:Blah blah blah, it's called a contract

[Carbonite]

Actually your analogy also has serious flaws. The companies in the posted article weren't trying to terminate the contract, they were simply transferring it to new owners. In many cases it would be the same person using the computer, just under a different company name.

If John Smith changes his name to John Jones, does Sprint PCS force an "acceleration" of the original contract and then make John Jones sign a new contract? No, that would be absurd. However, if a computer that once was part of Company X is now part of Company Z, the contract must be paid in full, yet Company Z must now also purchase a new contract.

The main reason your analofy doesn't hold up is because the situation are just too different. Cell phone contracts are relatively short (1-2 years) and inexpensive ($25-50/month) compared to software licenses. There's also numerous companies who offer very similar service. Microsoft is the only company who sells Windows XP, 2003 Server, etc. You can't go "somewhere else" unless you plan on migrating away from MS entirely. This is usually far too expensive, it's not at all like switching cell service. I do agree that companies need to read the contract much more carefully, but that doesn't excuse the fact that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly status.

Microsoft and the RIAA are actually useful

[TrueJim]

Legislatures often pass bad laws. Their intentions are good, but the letter of the law often leads to ridiculous conclusions when taken to the extreme.

It usually takes many years to discover how badly a law has been written, because it usually takes many years for people (or companies) to get around to pushing the wording to its logical conclusion. When Microsoft (or the RIAA, etc.) imposes seemingly ridiculously licensing terms on the public, they're actually doing us all a service in the long run, by quickly demonstrating to legislators that the applicable public policies are (in the long run) unworkable.

We know Microsoft isn't going to "win" in the long run (they're losing our data centers already, and eventually they'll lose our desktops and office suites as well), but when they do these extremely silly things they actually help hasten their own eventual demise, by rapidly educating the public (and the policy makers) about what's wrong with current regulation.

Getting laws corrected may feel like it's occuring with glacial slowness to those of us who already understand where things are heading, but it'll actually happen much more quickly than it would otherwise, the worse Microsoft behaves. So I say, heck ya Microsoft! Charge us twice for things you don't deliver...charge us ten times, twenty! Let's show the world what the phrase "illegal monopoly" -really- means.

Re:So?

[gl4ss]

better way to put it:

-hey, there's this company that wants us to pay them even if we stop using their product and there's an extra contract included that gives them rights to anything we have on our systems if they would want it. the contract also includes an extortion option for them we can do nothing about, and the system is going to go through expensive forced migration to another backwards incompatible system in short time, and this we can do nothing about either if we want our business to be safe. oh, and there's an alternative for using them that would free our balls from their fist.

-why exactly are we doing business with this company again?

surely, not as black'n'white as that, but if executives actually read and understood half of the stuff they agree with ms...