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Microsoft Flip-flopping on Virtualization License

Posted by samzenpus on from the make-up-your-mind dept.

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."

3 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. It's obvious by GFree · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. DUPE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Re:Why bother? by Ash-Fox · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    --
    Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.