The saddest thing is - the 'no right answer" questions are (in my mind) one of the *best* ways of evaluating a prospective hire if the interviewer then follows up with "Why did you do it that way?".
I've actually been given grief for trying to interview that way - fortunately the HR department was one person who had a hundred other things on her plate so it didn't go any further - but the impression I had was that HR bods tend to like questions that there is a definite yes/no, right/wrong answer to - and they don't like "why would you think this way?"-type questions because it's much easier to demonstrate you've followed a fair, non-discriminating process when you can simply say "this person ticked 12 boxes out of 15, this person ticked 14".
Asking on/. because I haven't found anything myself yet: Is there any such thing as an online backup service that:
1. Is either EU-based or is a signatory to the EU-US Safe Harbor scheme. 2. Has a reasonably good reputation - and doesn't consider customer data disposable. 3. Appreciates that we don't necessarily have unlimited bandwidth so offers a media-shipping option for data restores. 4. Operates a reseller program. 5. Supports OS X and Windows. 6. Isn't in some sort of crazed rush to the bottom that will ultimately guarantee any reputation they have right now evaporates over the next 18-24 months.
I've looked around and I don't think there's any such thing. Every major company I've found appears to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to restoring data with any degree of reliability.
If you give your entire customer list to a third party you are just asking for it to be abused. No matter how strict their "policies" may be with respect to handling your data, all it takes is one disgruntled employee to grab a copy on their way out the door and that's the best case.
I've actually seen one rather better (worse?) than this.
Company (A) sells an imaging-based backup solution. They sell their list of prospective customers to company (B).
Company (B) drills through every name and telephone number on the list trying to sell them an imaging-based backup solution from company (C) - a competitor of (A). When challenged, (B) insists that there's nothing wrong with this.
Apple aren't the best example - when apple announce something, it's because it's available now. Not because it may be available at some unspecified point in the future.
If you limit that to just Microsoft products, you need your head examined. Really it applies to everything in the industry - the product can safely be said to exist on the day you can actually buy it/download it and not before.
HP's balance sheet is up and down like a whore's drawers - one quarter they make a stonking loss, the next they're making solid profits. They haven't been consistent in years.
Their core businesses are being eaten away by ever-tougher competition; the days when you could confidently recommend an HP inkjet are long gone (have you seen their software suite lately? Multi-function devices are even worse because with them you often can't install just the bare driver and have it work); I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to their laser printer division sooner rather than later.
Were I to hazard a guess - and I'm not a fortune 500 CEO (if I was I wouldn't be on/.!) - I'd say they're thrashing around looking for something - anything - to carve themselves a new niche. Something they can do better than the competition, something that differentiates themselves from every other manufacturer out there. Nokia have spent some time doing the same thing.
1. You're approaching the problem from the wrong angle. IMV, the angle you take should be "how long can can I afford to be without this data and how much money am I prepared to throw at a solution?" rather than "what technology exists that I can use to make the system more reliable?". Taking the former approach allows you to plan exactly how you'd deal with data loss - whether it's through human error, software/hardware failure, fire, theft, flood or what have you. Taking the latter approach tends to result in some whacking great Heath Robinson (or if you're American, Rube Goldberg) of a solution that still has a whacking great hole in it somewhere.
2. 8TB of data is not an enormous amount by any modern standard. You can buy a NAS box off-the-shelf today that will take 12x3TB hard disks for 36TB (18TB if you've got the good sense to run them in a RAID 1+0 configuration) of storage; at this level they typically have replication built right into them so you can buy two and replicate one to the other (though like all replication-type solutions, it's not a form of backup and you mustn't treat it as such). If that doesn't appeal, simply put a couple of SATA controllers in a cheap box and run OpenFiler. Anything you cobble together yourself based on the latest clustered filesystem du jour will suffer from one huge flaw - a system that's designed to be highly-available is frequently less reliable than one that isn't, simply because you're making it that much more complicated that there's a lot more to go wrong.
What happens to Linux as a whole tomorrow if RedHat dies today?
There won't be a next version of CentOS. A huge number of contributors to F/OSS projects will have to take jobs elsewhere - and those jobs may not involve F/OSS.
Really what would be good would be a commercial-GPL type license. One that's exactly the same as the existing GPL but with an extra clause that goes like this:
"If you paid a sum of money for this software, you are still free to pass it on but you may not undercut the price the organisation that sold it to you charges."
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a troll. FWIW, I think hairyfeet makes a lot of very reasonable points. The idea that a high-quality, easy to maintain Unix-like OS can exist purely on rainbows and passion has got to die, because it's pushing the software industry into a crazed race to the bottom.
We've already seen what happens when you have such a race in PC hardware - you wind up with laptops that flex if you look at them funny, hard disk manufacturers that every so often release a model with an 80% failure rate over two years, hardware support that's so dire it's cheaper (and substantially better for the peptic ulcer you're nursing) to replace the part than it is to fight through the warranty process.
There's a number of ways you can deal with this, but one of the most important aspects is how you approach your CIO.
I'd strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people". It's mainly aimed at salesmen but there's a lot of information in there that's useful for people in all walks of life.
Because while Windows was designed with the idea of separation of privileges, an enormous amount of user-land software wasn't.
It doesn't help that Windows prevents you doing all sorts of arbitrary things without admin rights and - it's not like Unix where if push comes to shove, you can chmod the appropriate device in/dev and let anyone in the right group do something.
You can usually work around the need to do something as an admin with judicious registry and permissions tweaking - but most software doesn't come with documentation explaining how you might do so, nor does it set itself up to allow this when you install it. It just comes with documentation saying "run it as an admin - anything else is unsupported so don't come running to us if you encounter any problems while running as a non-admin".
You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of who is creating the problem...
Having said that, try making sure you're saving the file on the native format for the version of Word you're using - eg,.doc for Word 2000-XP,.docx for Word 2007 and above. Word messes up formatting enough between versions, let alone with documents exported from a competitor's product.
Oh, plenty of people understand who's creating the problem. And it's not hard to explain to those who don't.
But in all my life I have never heard of a business choosing F/OSS software purely on the basis of price. There's always a degree of pragmatism involved - "cheap and adequate" is usually how it pans out. As soon as you have to interact with someone else who's using MS Office, there's a good chance it ceases to be adequate.
Seriously, this idea that all debt is automatically evil is silly. There's absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It's a tool. We have tools like live CDs, antivirus, screwdrivers and such; the economy has tools like loans, bonds and such.
Where you run into trouble is if you can't service the debt. So really you want to avoid getting into so much debt that this is likely to be a problem. How much is too much? Depends how much you can service.
Funny, I could have sworn the iPhone (and Android for that matter) will happily check the certificate chain when establishing an SSL connection to their email server.
I think what's happening is that everyone else saw Apple price the iPad at around $500, and concluded that this was a benchmark price. Either that or Apple have tied up the supply chain so efficiently that it's very hard for other manufacturers to offer something similar for much less money.
In any case, for whatever reason everyone else decided "We can build one of those and flog it at a good profit at $500". The neglected one important point.
Apple can sell it at $500 because they've spent the last fifteen years re-establishing themselves in people's minds as manufacturers of beautifully designed, easy to operate products that sell at a premium price because they're worth paying a premium for - and if something does go wrong, they'll sort it out. (Note I'm talking about public perception here, not how accurate you believe this perception to be).
Every other manufacturer has spent the last fifteen years in a desperate race to the bottom. To hell with quality, if we can shave a few cents off the price here, another few cents off the price there and outsource support to India, we can sell this for $2/£2/€2 cheaper than the previous model. It's not unusual to find that well-known OEMs have "consumer" and "business" lines - the "business" products are more expensive, but you ring up support with a serial number that identifies it as a business product and you don't find yourself calling India. Not only that, but they'll send a man out with a screwdriver next day rather than expect you to pack up the product and ship it to a repair facility that has a 3 week lead time on repairs. But you don't find the business products for sale at your local retailer.
So the consumers who might buy a tablet computer see the Apple product on the shelf for $499, and the HP equivalent on the shelf also for $499. They remember their last HP laptop which broke down (fair enough, can happen to anyone), the two hours they spent on the phone to India and the three weeks they were without the laptop - and when it finally came back it had been wiped and reloaded, even though there was nothing the matter with the disk - and compare that with when their friend's iPhone broke down. Apparently, 20 minutes at the Apple store and it was replaced with a new one, with everything copied across beautifully. Which item do they think is worth $499?
Because Blackberry, IIRC, provide a messaging service comparable to SMS but using the phone's data connection. This messaging service offers end-to-end encryption.
Correction: Blackberry's marketing claimed it offered end-to-end encryption and that there was no way they could snoop on messages. IIRC they also told the Indian authorities something similar. The fact that this story is able to exist demonstrates that this is not true.
Can't say I'm particularly surprised myself. Telephony providers are more-or-less legally obliged to offer some sort of lawful intercept system in most countries; offering a phone for sale which provides a blatant run around that seems like an extremely good way to get your product banned in very short order.
"Off the rails" is possibly a slightly strong term - but in essence, yes. It's been fairly obvious for years that RMS not only doesn't really understand how much of the world works, he doesn't care to understand.
You can either accept that this is the way the world works and deal with it, or you can bury your head in the sand and pretend reality is somehow different.
by the time he finishes his speech, he has spoken at length on the differences. why repeat it to a journalist?
Most of the media has spent the last twenty years systematically reducing their staff. It's now the case (indeed, has been for some time) that asking a journalist to do much in the way of work in terms of researching and writing articles for anything that isn't really important to their readership is pretty much a waste of time - they've got far too many pages to fill and far too little time to write the content.
This is why so many things you read in the news read like barely warmed-over press releases - because they are barely warmed-over press releases.
And Richard Stallman is expecting journalists to read 10 separate pieces (yes I counted them) and attend a 2.5 hour long lecture before writing an article? It's totally unrealistic.
You're not thinking longterm. Microsoft can be patient, and Linux on the desktop is not growing at a rate that merits rapid, drastic measures.
I can see two paths:
1. Microsoft provide a mechanism to sign deployment images which is extended backwards to Win7. This makes sense anyway; it's common for larger businesses to deploy standardised images. Will be interesting to see how third-party deployment product vendors deal with this. 2. OEMs will indeed make sure it's switchable for Windows 8 PCs. But Windows 9 or 10......
A few have already noted that the original iPhone doesn't run iOS 5 - but queried why the bar is all green for that. There's a good reason - the graph shows whether or not the phone could run the latest OS up to three years after release, not whether or not it can run whatever the latest, greatest version is today. Each phone is following an independent timeline on that chart.
So if we look at the original iPhone - released 29 June 2007 - that would qualify for a green bar all the way along provided it could run whatever the latest version was on 29 June 2010. iOS 4 - the first version to drop support for the original iPhone - was released on June 21, 2010. Meaning that strictly speaking there should be a very thin yellow line at the tail end of the bar representing the original iPhone to show that it was a week off being 3 years old when support was dropped.
Similarly for the iPhone 3G - it's OK for the bar to be green all the way across as long as the iPhone 3G could run whatever the latest version was on 11 July 2011. The writing was on the wall for iOS 4 in July 2011 but iOS 5 was not released until 12 October.
The OEM's support for most Android phones, OTOH, usually ends long before buyers are out of contract - and it's quite common to find that a phone is running an out-of-date version of Android from the day it's released. Considering the plethora of locked bootloaders on Android phones, this is much more significant than many make out. Yeah, install Cyanogen. Great. But most manufacturers that provide any sort of rescue mode build it into the bootloader rather than into hardware - which means that unlocking the bootloader is not without risk. Myself, I take the attitude that I don't want dick around with my phone like I had to dick around with my computer fifteen years ago. I have in my pocket my first Android phone, absent a dramatic raising of standards on the part of at least one Android phone manufacturer it will be my last.
Yep, saves $$$$$ on licensing too, the machine license is included with the machine so on like a 5 year cycle, everybody would run windows 7 in 5 years, but we've had to make exceptions to that and use open license to upgrade some. Expensive, but compared to the bs that was going on back in the day, this is just fine.
Last time I checked (couple of years ago now) you couldn't use an OEM copy to mass-install Windows to a bunch of machines unless you actually were the OEM. So if you wanted an identical installation on every PC you bought, they got you that way.
Has that changed? Or has it simply not been a concern for you?
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The saddest thing is - the 'no right answer" questions are (in my mind) one of the *best* ways of evaluating a prospective hire if the interviewer then follows up with "Why did you do it that way?".
I've actually been given grief for trying to interview that way - fortunately the HR department was one person who had a hundred other things on her plate so it didn't go any further - but the impression I had was that HR bods tend to like questions that there is a definite yes/no, right/wrong answer to - and they don't like "why would you think this way?"-type questions because it's much easier to demonstrate you've followed a fair, non-discriminating process when you can simply say "this person ticked 12 boxes out of 15, this person ticked 14".
Asking on /. because I haven't found anything myself yet: Is there any such thing as an online backup service that:
1. Is either EU-based or is a signatory to the EU-US Safe Harbor scheme.
2. Has a reasonably good reputation - and doesn't consider customer data disposable.
3. Appreciates that we don't necessarily have unlimited bandwidth so offers a media-shipping option for data restores.
4. Operates a reseller program.
5. Supports OS X and Windows.
6. Isn't in some sort of crazed rush to the bottom that will ultimately guarantee any reputation they have right now evaporates over the next 18-24 months.
I've looked around and I don't think there's any such thing. Every major company I've found appears to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to restoring data with any degree of reliability.
If you give your entire customer list to a third party you are just asking for it to be abused. No matter how strict their "policies" may be with respect to handling your data, all it takes is one disgruntled employee to grab a copy on their way out the door and that's the best case.
I've actually seen one rather better (worse?) than this.
Company (A) sells an imaging-based backup solution. They sell their list of prospective customers to company (B).
Company (B) drills through every name and telephone number on the list trying to sell them an imaging-based backup solution from company (C) - a competitor of (A). When challenged, (B) insists that there's nothing wrong with this.
I called up (A). They weren't amused...
Apple aren't the best example - when apple announce something, it's because it's available now. Not because it may be available at some unspecified point in the future.
If you limit that to just Microsoft products, you need your head examined. Really it applies to everything in the industry - the product can safely be said to exist on the day you can actually buy it/download it and not before.
HP's balance sheet is up and down like a whore's drawers - one quarter they make a stonking loss, the next they're making solid profits. They haven't been consistent in years.
Their core businesses are being eaten away by ever-tougher competition; the days when you could confidently recommend an HP inkjet are long gone (have you seen their software suite lately? Multi-function devices are even worse because with them you often can't install just the bare driver and have it work); I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to their laser printer division sooner rather than later.
Were I to hazard a guess - and I'm not a fortune 500 CEO (if I was I wouldn't be on /.!) - I'd say they're thrashing around looking for something - anything - to carve themselves a new niche. Something they can do better than the competition, something that differentiates themselves from every other manufacturer out there. Nokia have spent some time doing the same thing.
Two issues here:
1. You're approaching the problem from the wrong angle. IMV, the angle you take should be "how long can can I afford to be without this data and how much money am I prepared to throw at a solution?" rather than "what technology exists that I can use to make the system more reliable?". Taking the former approach allows you to plan exactly how you'd deal with data loss - whether it's through human error, software/hardware failure, fire, theft, flood or what have you. Taking the latter approach tends to result in some whacking great Heath Robinson (or if you're American, Rube Goldberg) of a solution that still has a whacking great hole in it somewhere.
2. 8TB of data is not an enormous amount by any modern standard. You can buy a NAS box off-the-shelf today that will take 12x3TB hard disks for 36TB (18TB if you've got the good sense to run them in a RAID 1+0 configuration) of storage; at this level they typically have replication built right into them so you can buy two and replicate one to the other (though like all replication-type solutions, it's not a form of backup and you mustn't treat it as such). If that doesn't appeal, simply put a couple of SATA controllers in a cheap box and run OpenFiler. Anything you cobble together yourself based on the latest clustered filesystem du jour will suffer from one huge flaw - a system that's designed to be highly-available is frequently less reliable than one that isn't, simply because you're making it that much more complicated that there's a lot more to go wrong.
What happens to Linux as a whole tomorrow if RedHat dies today?
There won't be a next version of CentOS. A huge number of contributors to F/OSS projects will have to take jobs elsewhere - and those jobs may not involve F/OSS.
Really what would be good would be a commercial-GPL type license. One that's exactly the same as the existing GPL but with an extra clause that goes like this:
"If you paid a sum of money for this software, you are still free to pass it on but you may not undercut the price the organisation that sold it to you charges."
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't make them a troll. FWIW, I think hairyfeet makes a lot of very reasonable points. The idea that a high-quality, easy to maintain Unix-like OS can exist purely on rainbows and passion has got to die, because it's pushing the software industry into a crazed race to the bottom.
We've already seen what happens when you have such a race in PC hardware - you wind up with laptops that flex if you look at them funny, hard disk manufacturers that every so often release a model with an 80% failure rate over two years, hardware support that's so dire it's cheaper (and substantially better for the peptic ulcer you're nursing) to replace the part than it is to fight through the warranty process.
There's a number of ways you can deal with this, but one of the most important aspects is how you approach your CIO.
I'd strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people". It's mainly aimed at salesmen but there's a lot of information in there that's useful for people in all walks of life.
Because while Windows was designed with the idea of separation of privileges, an enormous amount of user-land software wasn't.
It doesn't help that Windows prevents you doing all sorts of arbitrary things without admin rights and - it's not like Unix where if push comes to shove, you can chmod the appropriate device in /dev and let anyone in the right group do something.
You can usually work around the need to do something as an admin with judicious registry and permissions tweaking - but most software doesn't come with documentation explaining how you might do so, nor does it set itself up to allow this when you install it. It just comes with documentation saying "run it as an admin - anything else is unsupported so don't come running to us if you encounter any problems while running as a non-admin".
You seem to have a basic misunderstanding of who is creating the problem...
Having said that, try making sure you're saving the file on the native format for the version of Word you're using - eg, .doc for Word 2000-XP, .docx for Word 2007 and above. Word messes up formatting enough between versions, let alone with documents exported from a competitor's product.
Oh, plenty of people understand who's creating the problem. And it's not hard to explain to those who don't.
But in all my life I have never heard of a business choosing F/OSS software purely on the basis of price. There's always a degree of pragmatism involved - "cheap and adequate" is usually how it pans out. As soon as you have to interact with someone else who's using MS Office, there's a good chance it ceases to be adequate.
Seriously, this idea that all debt is automatically evil is silly. There's absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It's a tool. We have tools like live CDs, antivirus, screwdrivers and such; the economy has tools like loans, bonds and such.
Where you run into trouble is if you can't service the debt. So really you want to avoid getting into so much debt that this is likely to be a problem. How much is too much? Depends how much you can service.
Funny, I could have sworn the iPhone (and Android for that matter) will happily check the certificate chain when establishing an SSL connection to their email server.
I think what's happening is that everyone else saw Apple price the iPad at around $500, and concluded that this was a benchmark price. Either that or Apple have tied up the supply chain so efficiently that it's very hard for other manufacturers to offer something similar for much less money.
In any case, for whatever reason everyone else decided "We can build one of those and flog it at a good profit at $500". The neglected one important point.
Apple can sell it at $500 because they've spent the last fifteen years re-establishing themselves in people's minds as manufacturers of beautifully designed, easy to operate products that sell at a premium price because they're worth paying a premium for - and if something does go wrong, they'll sort it out. (Note I'm talking about public perception here, not how accurate you believe this perception to be).
Every other manufacturer has spent the last fifteen years in a desperate race to the bottom. To hell with quality, if we can shave a few cents off the price here, another few cents off the price there and outsource support to India, we can sell this for $2/£2/€2 cheaper than the previous model. It's not unusual to find that well-known OEMs have "consumer" and "business" lines - the "business" products are more expensive, but you ring up support with a serial number that identifies it as a business product and you don't find yourself calling India. Not only that, but they'll send a man out with a screwdriver next day rather than expect you to pack up the product and ship it to a repair facility that has a 3 week lead time on repairs. But you don't find the business products for sale at your local retailer.
So the consumers who might buy a tablet computer see the Apple product on the shelf for $499, and the HP equivalent on the shelf also for $499. They remember their last HP laptop which broke down (fair enough, can happen to anyone), the two hours they spent on the phone to India and the three weeks they were without the laptop - and when it finally came back it had been wiped and reloaded, even though there was nothing the matter with the disk - and compare that with when their friend's iPhone broke down. Apparently, 20 minutes at the Apple store and it was replaced with a new one, with everything copied across beautifully. Which item do they think is worth $499?
Because Blackberry, IIRC, provide a messaging service comparable to SMS but using the phone's data connection. This messaging service offers end-to-end encryption.
Correction: Blackberry's marketing claimed it offered end-to-end encryption and that there was no way they could snoop on messages. IIRC they also told the Indian authorities something similar. The fact that this story is able to exist demonstrates that this is not true.
Can't say I'm particularly surprised myself. Telephony providers are more-or-less legally obliged to offer some sort of lawful intercept system in most countries; offering a phone for sale which provides a blatant run around that seems like an extremely good way to get your product banned in very short order.
"Off the rails" is possibly a slightly strong term - but in essence, yes. It's been fairly obvious for years that RMS not only doesn't really understand how much of the world works, he doesn't care to understand.
And this is why F/OSS has a PR problem.
You can either accept that this is the way the world works and deal with it, or you can bury your head in the sand and pretend reality is somehow different.
by the time he finishes his speech, he has spoken at length on the differences. why repeat it to a journalist?
Most of the media has spent the last twenty years systematically reducing their staff. It's now the case (indeed, has been for some time) that asking a journalist to do much in the way of work in terms of researching and writing articles for anything that isn't really important to their readership is pretty much a waste of time - they've got far too many pages to fill and far too little time to write the content.
This is why so many things you read in the news read like barely warmed-over press releases - because they are barely warmed-over press releases.
And Richard Stallman is expecting journalists to read 10 separate pieces (yes I counted them) and attend a 2.5 hour long lecture before writing an article? It's totally unrealistic.
Seriously, has nobody ever explained this to him?
If you're disabling all the IPMI features as a sysadmin, you're seriously missing out. Remote serial access at a BIOS level, what's not to like?
You're not thinking longterm. Microsoft can be patient, and Linux on the desktop is not growing at a rate that merits rapid, drastic measures.
I can see two paths:
1. Microsoft provide a mechanism to sign deployment images which is extended backwards to Win7. This makes sense anyway; it's common for larger businesses to deploy standardised images. Will be interesting to see how third-party deployment product vendors deal with this.
2. OEMs will indeed make sure it's switchable for Windows 8 PCs. But Windows 9 or 10......
Discontinued? You'd better tell Symantec that, they think they're still producing it.
A few have already noted that the original iPhone doesn't run iOS 5 - but queried why the bar is all green for that. There's a good reason - the graph shows whether or not the phone could run the latest OS up to three years after release, not whether or not it can run whatever the latest, greatest version is today. Each phone is following an independent timeline on that chart.
So if we look at the original iPhone - released 29 June 2007 - that would qualify for a green bar all the way along provided it could run whatever the latest version was on 29 June 2010. iOS 4 - the first version to drop support for the original iPhone - was released on June 21, 2010. Meaning that strictly speaking there should be a very thin yellow line at the tail end of the bar representing the original iPhone to show that it was a week off being 3 years old when support was dropped.
Similarly for the iPhone 3G - it's OK for the bar to be green all the way across as long as the iPhone 3G could run whatever the latest version was on 11 July 2011. The writing was on the wall for iOS 4 in July 2011 but iOS 5 was not released until 12 October.
The OEM's support for most Android phones, OTOH, usually ends long before buyers are out of contract - and it's quite common to find that a phone is running an out-of-date version of Android from the day it's released. Considering the plethora of locked bootloaders on Android phones, this is much more significant than many make out. Yeah, install Cyanogen. Great. But most manufacturers that provide any sort of rescue mode build it into the bootloader rather than into hardware - which means that unlocking the bootloader is not without risk. Myself, I take the attitude that I don't want dick around with my phone like I had to dick around with my computer fifteen years ago. I have in my pocket my first Android phone, absent a dramatic raising of standards on the part of at least one Android phone manufacturer it will be my last.
Wonder what would have happened if that 100$ notebook had come after XP death process had moved too far to be rescued.
Windows for Netbooks! Now Available! Runs all your favourite Windows applications!
(only available as OEM license, it's actually XP but with a Vista-style colour scheme).
Yep, saves $$$$$ on licensing too, the machine license is included with the machine so on like a 5 year cycle, everybody would run windows 7 in 5 years, but we've had to make exceptions to that and use open license to upgrade some. Expensive, but compared to the bs that was going on back in the day, this is just fine.
Last time I checked (couple of years ago now) you couldn't use an OEM copy to mass-install Windows to a bunch of machines unless you actually were the OEM. So if you wanted an identical installation on every PC you bought, they got you that way.
Has that changed? Or has it simply not been a concern for you?