The company’s ubiquity means that one can’t help but notice the sometimes unpleasant, occasionally weird and often downright sleazy things that it does.
The thing that caught my eye this week was the following line in the End User License Agreement (EULA) for Microsoft’s Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium: “USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.” (See page 11 of the EULA .)
Several commentators have concluded that what the EULA really means is you can’t install a second copy of Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium in a virtual machine, but I submit that is not how a normal consumer would interpret the EULA, nor is that the way Microsoft intends it to be interpreted.
Indeed, page 1 of the EULA says: “You may install one copy of the software on the licensed device. You may use the software on up to two processors on that device at one time.” That clause covers the multiple-use issue and confirms the intention of the virtualization prohibition.
What is interesting is that the prohibition on virtualization doesn’t apply to the Vista Business and Vista Ultimate versions, so what could be the logic behind this? According to an interview of a Microsoft spokesman by ZDNet Asia, “virtualization is a fairly new technology and one that we think is not yet mature enough for broad consumer adoption.”
So Microsoft wants to “protect” the consumer? That simply makes no sense. It would be like Microsoft trying to prevent the use of Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium to access the Internet because Internet technology is not yet mature enough.
But what does “mature enough” mean? Was Microsoft’s Bob operating system mature enough? Was Internet Explorer 6 mature enough? Was Windows 95?
Of course not! But Microsoft was willing to let consumers use them anyway. In fact, it can be argued that no operating system or large application is ever mature enough, because all of them have bugs, omissions and sundry design gotchas that can confound even the most technically proficient, let alone the average consumer.
Secondly, to prohibit consumers from using a product in a manner that doesn’t obviously relate to the product’s core value is ethically indefensible.
The real weirdness clincher is making the prohibition legally binding through the EULA. Microsoft didn’t just provide advice to consumers; the company made it so that it could take consumers to court should they be caught running Basic or Premium in a virtual machine. That’s the way to build a loyal consumer base!
If Microsoft keeps this clause in the final Vista EULA, I think every right-minded consumer should consider this as an issue of unfair trade practice by the corporate equivalent of a schoolyard bully.
Consumers should get themselves a virtualization system, such as VMware or Parallels, and run it with Vista Basic or Vista Premium on principle. If Microsoft decides to take legal action, I think we’ll all ante up for the consumer’s defense.
Letting Microsoft get away with this will set a precedent that will come back to bite us in the digital assets, allowing, as it will, software vendors and ultimately hardware vendors to dictate how, when and where we can use their products. The first hurdle will be the consumer market, then the professional market. How hard do you want your job and your life to be?
Bottom line: Just say “Hell, yes” to the idea of virtualization.
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