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Microsoft Slugs Mac Users With Vista Tax
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.
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
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.