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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."
There is no SPLA for Windows 7.
That's what is so weird:
MS will let you farm out 2k8 RDS sessions, with essentially all the trimmings that Win7 would be capable of over RDP, for the right money; but they simply Will Not Sell an SPLA to perform the (with contemporary virtualization and deduplicated storage backends) virtually identical act of farming out Win7 VMs.
I honestly find it rather puzzling. If they didn't offer 'desktopish' SPLAs at all, that'd be unpleasant of them; but would be a coherent 'no way are we letting thin clients take over' strategy. If they followed a 'we don't care how you do it, we just want to get paid per month, per seat' approach, that'd be similarly coherent.
As it is, though, there just doesn't seem to be a coherent logic behind the licensing terms.
Well, everyone is different. I can't stand OSX and Ubuntu. So what!
As a contractor, I have to work in all of them - they are all as bad (or good) as each other. Just different.
Also, the users bitch about each of them equally.
Well, no, not in your crappy backwater country, and not with some locked down hardware like an ipad. But in more sensible and advanced societies like, er, China, these kinds of things are readily available, and cheaper too.
Girl, you need more training. As messed up as our copyright and patent laws are, they are originally based on some very "sensible and advanced" ideas relating to a person's property and protection of individual rights. In China, human beings are largely regarded as disposable cattle. They can be jailed, suppressed, censored, and executed whenever the state decides to do so. Let me put it another way. I'll much happier put up with my government instituting silly policies like not allowing ripping of a DVD, than for my government to censor internet access to purely political/religious ideas, throw bloggers in jail for criticizing the government, etc.
Windows desktop operating system and Microsoft Office system licenses do not permit renting, leasing, or outsourcing the software to a third party. As a result, many organizations that rent, lease, or outsource desktop PCs to third parties (such as Internet cafés, hotel and airport kiosks, business service centers, and office equipment leasing companies) are not in compliance with Microsoft license requirements. Rental Rights are a simple way for organizations to get a waiver of these licensing restrictions through a one-time license transaction valid for the term of the underlying software license or life of the PC.
Nevermind I looked it up at https://partner.microsoft.com/40104043
Anyone who needs to run Windows-exclusive apps.
In other words, most businesses and their employees.
I would argue quite the opposite, most business and employees actually only need a small subset of the features that Microsoft's products have, and most of these features have been replicated or improved upon by free software.
Especially where Office is concerned.
I migrated 80 people from Exchange to Google Apps, Office to LibreOffice, etc. It can be done, you just need support from management.
Outlook? Web-based Google Apps mail. Calendar? Same thing. Office? LibreOffice. The only internal servers we have left are 2 AD servers and a fileserver; I plan on moving that to Box.net/Dropbox/Gdrive at some point.
Considering there is gross negligence in the article I don't think he's wrong to be a 'chump' as you put it. As an SPLA provider I can confirm there IS a win7 license available under SPLA. The article the person points to glosses over the licenses existence because he can't get an answer from microsoft on how to use it. So he gets a shitty rep and suddenly the license ceases to exist. So yeah, this article is full of bullshit and never should have made it to the front page. Sending emails isn't going to get you through the bureaucracy that is Microsoft, you pickup the damn phone and talk to your SPLA rep and request one of the license guys like I have in the past when trying to clarify MS's lame ass licenses. Being unwilling to do the legwork to get the facts doesn't give you the right to pull shit out of your ass and claim its reality.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Though MM may in fact use *nix solutions as stated, I find the opening line of that post is disingenuous as worded, so I've edited it here to make it more obvious what is being said:
No open source software that I've seen handles the Microsoft proprietary format docx halfway as well as the Microsoft native applications for the format, Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Bolding mine, to point out the obvious deficiencies of that argument.
User eldorel is right, even if the pro-MS crowd doesn't like to admit it.
most business and employees actually only need a small subset of the features that Microsoft's products have, and most of these features have been replicated or improved upon by free software.
Especially where Office is concerned.
It has been widely touted that Office 07 and 10 both have support for ODF, though from what I've read in articles I understand it to be better implemented in 10. As a true cross-platform, cross-app standard, perhaps a "professional" IT person relied upon by otherwise unknowing end users might suggest that their company begin using *that* as the way in which to author and save their documents. Doing so just might create a result better than "the dog just puked on the screen" when a document happens to be opened by someone using a different brand of the same type of application. That's the whole point of the thing, really, isn't it? So why should we not support that, for the sake of our end users? In order to promote/prop up the MS hegemony? Not a good idea, from where I sit.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
Like Nokia they may have a special deal where Microsoft pays THEM per activated user
Funny story about that.
I recently bought a cheap Android China phone, supposedly based on the a MediaTek SoC. When it arrived, it had a slightly modified version of ICS, felt solid and well-made and ran very nicely, much more responsive than I expected from the specs. I decided to reflash the firmware to get a clean English-language install, but couldn't get it to load a new ROM.
To cut a long story short, I dismantled it and found a nice Snapdragon CPU and lots of HTC branding. Turns out it was one of the HTC HD7 Windows phones that nobody would buy, re-purposed as an Android phone. They're selling like hotcakes in Asia.
It'll be worth keeping your eyes open in a few months - there's likely to be a whole bunch of cheap Microsoft-subsidised reflashed Nokias showing up on the grey markets as well. They'd be good machines with a decent OS running on them.
But at least it seems to indicate that MS is not that unhappy with them. Which makes sense, as they'll have to compete with Apple's iWork soon. More and more people are going to use that if the Microsoft alternative is not available. So here are these nice guys from Onlive keeping people in the Microsoft ecosystem, temporarily for free, until they can be switched to paying versions. Win-win, right?
There's no need for users to "understand a new suite of office applications" - simply for them to make "Save as ODF" their new default. Within a year, or at most 2-3 years, I'd doubt you would be running into any other format, even in your 'legacy' documents, because in a business most things written don't have a lifespan even that long. And you would still have the capability to open those much older formats, if the need arose. WRT databases, I agree that they would be a bigger issue.
.doc to .docx.
:)
As far as then having compatibility differences with documents from other companies, that is understandable/not unreasonable to expect. Some sort of educational campaign would come in handy to make this an eventual non-issue; like along the lines of what Firefox did with a full-page ad in the NYT back in '04. I don't know by what metric you could determine how much an effect that ad had in FFox eventually shouldering aside IE, but I am fairly certain that it did help in a major way, if only to shine a very public light for a day on FFox as an alternative to the lack of concern MS evinced with updating their browser. If a campaign of education and information were to come about so that the document compatibility issue became - for a short while at least - a topic of broad discussion, perhaps the cross-x concern would be lessened. I don't see how cross-company, cross-platform, cross-app compatibility could be viewed as a "bad thing" to implement by anyone, especially not when it is as simple as changing a single default setting in your already-existing software. Yes, there will be a transitional period, but there always is, even from
Your last point is a good one, and ironically amusing. Thanks for the civil discourse.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain