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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."
Is it their fault that Microsoft didn't think they were literal when they wrote the planet Earth in as their location?
Windows 2008 Remote Desktop Services with Remote Desktop Experience pack (which gives you essentially a complete Win7 experience) is how you do it under SPLA. That would be legal under SPLA.
I am with a Microsoft Gold Partner, and we host and use the SPLA. The fact is that they would need to use these licenses at a minimum:
* Remote Desktop SAL (6WC-00002) @ 3.45 a month
* Office Standard (021-08183) @ $10.30 a month
That is $13.75 a month per user they need to pay Microsoft + all the other costs for hardware, support, etc.
no comment
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.
No open source software that I've seen handles docx halfway as well as Word 2007 and Word 2010. "Good enough", as in "this wordprocessing software is good enough for almost all needs" is a given, but that's not really the question. You're talking about sixteen or seventeen years of Office dominance here, coupled with Exchange. Do you understand the manpower that would be required to convert a large company from Office-Exchange to something else (assuming that something else was in fact an improvement in any real sense).
I'll concede right now that I loath Exchange. I hate it. I hate everything about. I hate how brittle aspects of it are, the bizarre dependencies with other systems like IIS which means if .NET/ASP takes a nosedive, your clients suddenly find out they've lost a whole lot of functionality. Believe me, I've had many sleepless nights over Windows because it's seemingly easy configurations are filled with pitfalls. I love the *nix world where you can got "cp worldsmostimportant.conf worldsmostimportant.conf.bak" and muck around to my hearts content with the config, knowing I can pretty much wipe out any changes by inverting the command and restarting the daemon. At heart, I'm a *nix man and have been for over two decades. I fit *nix and open source solutions in wherever I can.
But at the end of the day, my boss and my coworkers are expecting to walk in, log on to their Windows workstation, start up Outlook, work on their budget in Excel and read the latest business requirements documentation in Word. I hand them Zimbra and LibreOffice, and it's going to be nasty. Eventually I might calm the waters, but then someone is inevitably going to get some Word 2010 document with wild formatting and it's going to open up in LibreOffice like the dog just puked on the screen, and then I'm going to get demands for solutions, and the only solution is going to be "I guess we should have Word on there."
In the long term, Microsoft's dominance even in the business world will begin to wane, no doubt about it. As more tablets and smartphones make their way in, and the requirements of more open document standards and protocols become clear, things will change. But until then, and as ugly as it sometimes is, in the big world, Exchange-Office are still way ahead.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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?
Speculating about the terms is useless. There is no requirement that this customer uses a standard license or terms. Like Nokia they may have a special deal where Microsoft pays THEM per activated user, and now Microsoft is saying "er, wait. This isn't going how we thought so let's draw your attention to Paragraph 752, subparagraph 17 which reads 'offer void under the following conditions' and under codicil 3 of the 4th amendment was added the text 'if we say so'." We don't, and won't know the terms so there's no point in talking about it.
OnLive should have known better. Nothing good comes of bargaining with the devil.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Those who ignore Unix are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
and will you swallow? YES and YES!
Not sure why parent was modded down... that's straight from a MS EULA.
I8-D