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Is Onlive Pirating Windows and Will It Cost Them?
An anonymous reader writes "When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft's licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can't."
They are probably using the SPLA for this. That allows you to license software for your service on a monthly basis.
(i know, i know.. i will punish myself later)
i read this as being: onlive is not presently legit but microsoft is playing nice (i.e. squeezing them for every last nickel without involving more than a few lawyers) for now -- until they lose patience (or feel threatened by being beating to market by an upstart.. not once but twice) and bring the sledgehammer down on onlive's entire business model -- windows and office desktop and gaming platform (xbox and windows games, at least)
I agree with you except the issue is Windows 7.. MS offers licences for things like EC2 and SPLA for Server OS and software - but not for Windows 7 desktop OS.. the fact that Onlive provides a Windows 7 interface over a 2008R2 is what is odd and likely to cause them problems.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
No, but there's no actual proof that onlive has done anything wrong. The terms are not public. When did we start accepting rampant speculation as journalism?
Actually, there are several different Microsoft documents which say precisely that Office can be licensed per processor. However, I couldn't find anyone who had actually done it that way. So for the article I listed the license as a possibility, since I couldn't exclude it, but not a probability, since no one could confirm it. For example, the SPLA datasheet explicitly cites Office as being available per processor: download.microsoft.com/download/7/a/a/.../spla_datasheet.pdf. If you can prove that the datasheet is wrong, we can certainly update the article, otherwise the insults ring pretty hollow.--David Cardinal
Source? According to the Human Rights Council's website, the US and China are both current members.
Also, although the US has no federal shield laws for journalists, most states do (and I really doubt China has any).
Clearly the US government has committed human-rights abuses, but are you seriously arguing that China has a better record on human rights than the US?
Linux printing is easy and has been for some time. Ditto scanning. There are a few unsupported printers, but they're the real cheap pieces of shit.
As an SPLA provider I can confirm there IS a win7 license available under SPLA.
Huh, maybe you should let Joe Matz, VP of Worldwide Licensing and Pricing at Microsoft know, since he says, "However, it is important to note that SPLA does not support delivery of Windows 7 as a hosted client."
He also mentions, "We are actively engaged with OnLive with the hope of bringing them into a properly licensed scenario, and we are committed to seeing this issue is resolved," which implies that OnLive is not currently properly licensed.
Um, we dont have a forced sterilization program here.
You did until about the start of the eighties. The US was actually one of the first countries to adopt forced sterilization programs and kind of kick-started the whole eugenics movement. (Also, you know who else was in favour of eugenics and forced sterilization? Winston Churchill.)