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.

Re:It's obvious

[MysteriousPreacher]

That would be tricky for MS to pull-off but they could just make it very difficult for certain applications to run on Windows. Require a certification process, implement technical measures to authenticate the applications and then use the DMCA to destroy anyone who dares to bypass the protection by using fake credentials.

Make it nice and expensive to obtain the credentials, or just use a clever licence agreement and that'll certainly stop the pesky open-source kids from meddling. The best thing is, if the DoJ decide to take an interest, MS can tell them that it's necessary for security.

I really can see Windows going the same as some console platforms. Either you make your software with permission or you don't do it at all.

Since when is a license needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you believe that EULAs are enforcable.

Market Segmentation

[ZwJGR]

Artificially introduced market segmentation.

Seperate the user base by requirements. To match a low, medium and high priced product range, when there is no real difference between the actual products other than artificial restrictions.
By specifically disbaling certain features from the low versions, power users (the few who will touch Visat with a bargepole), will be forced to empty their bank accounts for the high version (Vista Ultimate/Business), otherwise they may just buy the version which could do everything they required (which would be cheaper).
Less revenue for Microsoft.

This is similar to the recent debate over MS Visual Studio Express vs. Professional. The former's EULA disallowing plugins of some variety which actually loaded fine. This forced users to buy the uncrippled version for actual development. More money to MS.

Re:Market Segmentation

[Rakishi]

Uhhmmm, your point? This is done by almost every company out there, including hardware companies (no, once the yields are good that low end cpu is no different from a high end one except for being factory clocked lower).

What do you prefer, that every copy cost more than the medium priced version does now? That people who can't afford the product not be able to buy one with only the features they USE for less?

DUPE!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Price Tag

[Evil Cretin]

Since when is a price tag an effective means of combating malware? When it makes people switch to Linux.

No kidding.

[jimicus]

"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.

The thing that's going on is market segmentation. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version. It's the exact same principle as is used for pricing some commercial databases according to "number of CPUs in the system which is going to be running it" - anyone who's got the money to buy and the need to run a 16-processor system can probably afford to spend more on the database, regardless of whether there's any technical difference between the 16 processor version and the 8 processor version of the software.

Re:No kidding.

[suv4x4]

"Something else must be going on here". No shit sherlock.

The thing that's going on is market segmentation [wikipedia.org]. To put it briefly: Microsoft reckons that those customers who are likely to want to run Vista in a virtual environment have got the money to buy a more expensive version.

If it was that simple, Microsoft wouldn't conflict itself so much. There are many more things going on, not the least of which, is the virtualization on the Mac (not a core Mac user myself).

Mac+OSX has still many disadvantages on its own, the biggest of which is vendor support for software and games. Parallels integrates relatively seamlessly virtualized Windows into a Mac.

Under virtualization, you really don't need more than Vista Home, since you can't run Aero anyway, so people would naturally flock to that. Many PC owners are willing to switch to Mac today, as long as they have a seamless Windows experience, which they still need.

Microsoft isn't just trying to make a buck, they're trying to decrease the rate of Vista/Windows virtualization. The problem here is: they can't change the license of XP which is out there already and people run that on their Macs.

So the conflict (at least part of it) is: forbid virtualization on cheap Vista (and thus stiffle Vista adoption as people run their XP on Macs), or allow virtualization since XP already allows virtualization anyway.

And only after all those strategy issues are resolved, comes the question if Microsoft could make more buck with expensive virtualizable Vista: corporate customers usually need to virtualize Windows for testing. But they don't really need a ton of copies for that purpose. A 1000 employee company may need just 5-6 licenses for the 5-6 developers who specifically need to do testing of their software. Hence the buck making potential isn't really quite there.

Losing their platform

[sucker_muts]

The reason Microsoft wants to keep the cost high to virtualize Vista is because they want people to actually run Vista as the main os. When lots of people start running linux (or parallels on macs), they are using Vista simply as a bunch of libraries to run one or two apps.

They want to remain in control of the platform, if people use mac or linux as their main os and use Windows to run one of those not-yet-supported programs the power of Microsoft wil start to degrade...

Apple doesn't even give you the choice

[ex-geek]

Microsoft gives you at least a (costly) option. Apple (correct me, if I'm wrong) doesn't.

And no, I am not a MS fanboy. I've been using Linux for more then ten years almost exclusively. Lack of hassle with licensing issues being one of the reasons for my choice of OS.

Re:Apple doesn't even give you the choice

[itsdapead]

Microsoft gives you at least a (costly) option. Apple (correct me, if I'm wrong) doesn't.

True-ish, and Apple certainly can't chuck any bricks in that particular greenhouse. However, there are a couple of mitigating factors:

1. Apple do not have a 95% monopoly of the desktop market. If you don't like Apple's policy, vote with your feet (sounds like you already have). OTOH the group who are disadvantaged most by MS's policy are those who don't like Windows and are trying to switch to Mac or Linux but - because of the MS software monoculture - can only do so if they still have a way of accessing Windows.
2. The issue of virtualising OSX is in a chicken-and-egg state - I don't know if VMWare or Parallels support EFI (needed by OSX) or support OSX's graphics requirements (of course, no one reputable will admit to having tried it).
3. I don't think there's a huge market for it (once you dismiss the "I want to try OSX on my PC" brigade) - the big demands for windows-hosted virtualization come from the developer and server consolidation markets. The Apple world doesn't have the huge army of in-house developers that buy VMWare Workstation , and I'd guess that OSX Server is used predomniantly for high performance file sharing, render-farming etc. - not the sort of things you virtualize. The money in OSX-hosted virtualization is from users who need to run Windows. (Cross refernce with above point). I'm guessing they only support other non-MS guests because they were already supported by their existing windows-hosted products.

If Apple doesn't sort this out soon they're going to start hacking off developers - virtualization is so darn useful. This will come to a head when 10.5 is released and betas of 10.6 go out and developers have to juggle past, present and future major versions of the x86 based OS - but the initiative will have to come from developers, via Apple - Parallels and VMWare have no strong incentive to break a sweat over it.

P.S. Also bear in mind that the last thing Apple want is, officially or otherwise, a "try-before-you-buy" route for OSX: even if the implementation was non-flakey, the first impression of playing with a new OS is always frustration because of the differences and the fact that your instinct is to plunge into "clever stuff" rather than work through the basics. Better if you are sold on the idea by an evangelist, part with cash, and have a $2000 incentive to get over having to press the fricking pretzel key instead of "ctrl".

UAC for management

[vdboor]

You are changing the EULA of your latest product. cancel or allow? :-)

The Mac Threat

[stewbacca]

From TFA:

Cynics say that this is Microsoft's way of punishing Mac switchers, while Microsoft calls it a "security" issue.

Microsoft isn't stupid, and they can see the writing on the wall. Switchers pose a problem for Microsoft, because most anecdotal evidence and many studies show that switchers don't switch back to Windows. Now before you bash me as an Apple fanboi, consider this: most people who leave Windows are looking for an out due to frustration. Even if you think Mac OS X is inferior to Windows, someone looking to get away from Windows might not be the most objective person in the world. Apple's plan is to get people to switch, to just taste OS X, and then count on them not going back to Windows. Intel Macs make it "safe" for users to try it, because they can always fall back to Windows if OS X doesn't work out for them.

The most ridiculous part of the MS strategy, though, is to assume people pay attention to the EULA anyway. I recently installed XP on my Intel Mac on to a boot camp partition. Parellels is smart enough to see the boot camp partition and run in VM mode. Is that "illegal"? Will Microsoft come kick in my door? Would I be able to do the same thing with Vista (probably) even though the EULA states I can't?

A few lines of Wisdom

[MemoryDragon]

Mac OSX Home Basic 129$
Mac OSX Home Premium 129$
Mac OSX Business 129$
Mac OSX Ultimate 129$

Ubuntu Home Basic 0$
Ubuntu Home Premium 0$
Ubuntu Business 0$
Ubuntu Ultimate 0$

A both OSes have home versions which allow restore of backuped Data...
For Vista you need Ultimate or Business to get restore functionality ;-)

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.

Lame

[palemantle]

From TFA: "For its part, Microsoft says that hypervisor rootkits are a serious threat to virtualization, and they could be right."

Surely, they don't mean to suggest that hypervisor rootkits stop being a threat as soon as the user ponies up the additional $210 or so for a Vista Ultimate edition?
Come on, M$, take your time and try to come up with a better excuse than that! Saying ... oooh hypervisor rootkit!!! ... won't fool any of the guys who know enough to employ virtualization.

DRM Thing?

[Zo0ok]

Not even the Ultimate License allows you to watch/play DRMd content in a virtual machine. It is impossible to technically restrict what can be done with content as soon as it is played in a Virtual Machine. Audio is especially easy to make perfect digital copies of, even if it is DRMd.

Allowing home editions of Vista to be run in Virtual Machines would essentially make the DRM protection in Vista useless.

Let 'em shoot themselves the foot

[GomezAdams]

My current assignment is with a server consolidation team. One of the things we are doing is reducing the number of servers and virtualizing everything we can. If we can't virualize MS Windows to reduce hardware count then in the future Linux will be the platform of choice for servers. All the major players have Linux versions of the server software I use - databases and web based servers are the majority of corporate servers today so when I design systems I don't even consider a Microsoft based solution. Scalability and security are the main reasons. The Microsoft solution is to throw hardware at a problem requiring more licenses and more expense to the data center at all levels. Since Java runs everywhere, although I prefer other languages, WebSphere and WebLogic are the major players along with Apache for web based applications. Any database I need runs on any UNIX and some Linux distros. So I have no need to fight the PHBs who eat Microsoft FUD for breakfast when I can point to, in this case, millions of dollars in annual savings when they dump every server running Microsoft and never put another one in the data centers.

So leave Gates and Co alone. I don't want them to allow virtualization. It will make my job a whole lot easier.