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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."
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.
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.
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.