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?

[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.