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Microsoft Slugs Mac Users With Vista Tax

Posted by samzenpus on from the pay-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mac users wanting to run Vista on their Macintosh, alongside Mac OS X programs, will have to buy an expensive version of Vista if they want to legally install it on their systems. The end-user license agreement for the cheaper versions of Vista (Home Basic and Home Premium) explicitly forbids the use of those versions on virtual machines (i.e., Macs pretending to be PCs)." Update: 02/08 17:50 GMT by KD : A number of readers have pointed out that the Vista EULA does not forbid installing it via Apple's Bootcamp; that is, the "tax" only applies to running Vista under virtualization.

3 of 661 comments (clear)

  1. So? by FliesLikeABrick · · Score: 1, Redundant

    So they can't use it in Parallels or whatever the vmware-equivalent is... neither can anyone else who wants to do it in vmware or VirtualBox

    Bootcamp isn't emulated hardware last time I checked, it is just running Windows on the intel hardware

  2. Uhmm by NitsujTPU · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Why can't the Mac users just boot directly into Vista?

    Virtualization, in the sense that it's meant in this usage, only works if the operating system would have worked natively on the original hardware. IE, those Mac users could boot up to Windows with no problems. The issue only arises if they want to run it in a virtual machine monitor, which has myriad other uses than running applications for one OS "under" another.

  3. Re:Your points 1 and 2 don't prove it "Incorrect" by AusIV · · Score: 0, Redundant
    Actually, the way the license is phrased you can't run Windows Vista in a virtual machine within a Windows Vista virtual machine of that same license. My interpretation of it is that you probably could boot Windows Vista, and run that same installation in a virtual machine (as parallels allows) so long as the host OS is OSX.

    Microsoft may have had a different intention, but until a judge has ruled otherwise, I think it's safe to run Vista on Parallels on OSX. (Note, the example case, if there is one, will be a business, not a home user, so individuals shouldn't be concerned about becoming the example).