Microsoft Flip-flopping on Virtualization License

Cole writes "Microsoft came within a few hours of reversing its EULA-based ban on the virtualization of Vista Basic and Premium, only to cancel the announcement at the last minute. The company reached out to media and bloggers about the announcement and was ready to celebrate "user choice" before pulling the plug, apparently clinging to security excuses. From the article, "The threat of hypervisor malware affects Ultimate and Business editions just as much as Home Premium and Basic. As such, the only logical explanation is that Microsoft is using pricing to discourage users from virtualizing those OSes. Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware?" Something else must be going on here."

Comments

It's obvious

[GFree]

This is clearly Microsoft suffering a managerial battle of the wills. One half wants to bow down to pressure to reverse the EULA ban on virtulization, while the other half is strong opposed to relenting.

I suspect (hope) that desperation with the lack of popularity of Vista will force Microsoft's hand.

DUPE!

[Anonymous Coward]

This was already mentioned yesterday: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/20/064324 1

Re:Why bother?

[l3mr]

For games, maybe?

Re:Why bother?

[crhylove]

Yes, but most games don't actually run well under virtualization. Or Wine for that matter.

There are however some AWESOME Linux native games:

Zsnes (every super nintendo game)
Mupen (every Nintendo 64 game)
Urban Terror (Linux Native!)

Other than those all I really miss is Grand theft Auto, which doesn't run well in virtualization anyway, and Civilization 2, which also doesn't run great virtualized, and further, is pretty damned old these days, though still more playable than civ 3 or 4.

Re:Microsof is right

[idesofmarch]

Your post would be valid if Microsoft actually gave free technical support with their OSes. However, this is not the case - usually a for-fee trouble ticket is required for anything beyond activation key issues.

Re:Why bother?

[l3mr]

Actually, a lot of games do run nicely virtualized, at least on my mac with parallels 3.0. Haven't tried gaming on linux for a while, but i guess with wine/cedega in addition to virtualization you should get most games to run...

Re:Why bother?

[Kyojin]

See also:

Nexuiz (Quake 3 clone) http://alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Planeshift (Still in alpha stage, but it works) http://www.planeshift.it/

Also check the package list in Ubuntu etc.

If you're looking for games that work under Wine, look no further than World of Warcraft, Oblivion, and so forth.

Re:Why bother?

[Ash-Fox]

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office XP installs out of the box when you doubleclick setup.exe in Ubuntu (Wine comes with Ubuntu). Microsoft Office 2003 requires you install a few things first because Microsoft didn't include it with the installer like they did for Office XP. Such as MSXML and a few other components.

The completely entirety of Adobe Creative Suite (that includes Photoshop).

I know the older versions work fine (alternatives to Photoshop though do exist, like Krita, which is closer to the Windows version of Photoshop and The Gimp, which is closer to the OS X version of Photoshop).

3DSMax

Apparently it doesn't run too well under wine, however there are alternatives like Maya (non-opensource alternative, just like you wanted) or Blender (once was closed-source software).

FL Studio

FL studio has gold ranking in the Wine application database, so no problems there.

Fine Reader

Not only have I never heard of that application, but nor has Wine's application database... A quick look on Google results show me a RSS reader... There are plenty good alternatives to those.

Disclaimer: I run Windows XP and have Ubuntu setup for Apache/PHP testing (production server on CentOS).

The fact you run only servers with Linux shows, it's quite apparent you have no knowledge on running those applications under Linux.

Virtualization - for the OS that can't multitask

[glamb]

VMWare is great - you create all these little servers running one app each. OR you could run an OS that multitasks properly like one of the fine UNIX OS's from Sun, IBM or HP.

Yes, I know it has other uses, but the main one is to replace the hundreds of shitty little 1RU Windows boxen in the computer room

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it has ASIO support (you have to use jack, obviously). There appears to be trouble with input in version 7.0 but output apparently works just fine, since that release is less than a month old, I guess they just need time to fix the issues.

Re:Virtualization - for the OS that can't multitas

[bberens]

VMWare is ideal for development on multiple platforms. On the same box I can run window, HP-UX, and RHEL. Then multiple developers can use the same piece of hardware as a development/build/test platform. For that matter we have different VMs for different builds of our software so that we can write patches to the previous versions very simply. The only thing they can't do is load test as effectively as if they had their own server. I'm sure there are people who use virtual machines in their production environment but I've never met them. I would assume (possibly incorrectly) it's mostly used in major operations.

Re:Why bother?

[SiChemist]

I play Civ 4 under Cedega. It runs just fine considering I do have a recently upgraded Mobo, processor, RAM and video card. The video card is a GeForce 7600GT (hardly state of the art), and the processor is an Athlon 64 X2 5600+ which is pretty fast. The game does crash on occasion, but I've heard that it crashes on Windows as well.

I have a few older games that I play under Cedega. When it works, it usually works pretty well.