Saturday, February 18, 2006
MS Winows - What do you get for your money?
A lot of people think that when they buy software they actually own it. This may be true for some software but in most instances all you pay for is the right to use it for as long as the real owner deems fit. Of course this depends on your local copyright legistation to some extent. For instance in Australia there is a little known provision that if a piece of software is no longer available and abandoned (no more development or support) it is deemed free to use. We used this many years ago to freely copy an old DOS menu program we used on our Novell network. AFAIK this provision still exists.
Now this is where the crunch hits the fan. It was recently reported on The Register that the right to use MS Windows was locked inextricably to the motherboard on which it was origonally used. Now I have long known that the license said that you only had the right to use the software for as long as MS wanted you to use it, and that you could not sell it, give it away, which effectively means that if you sell your PC you cannot give or sell the copy of windows with it. But what this new revelation means is that if you change your motherboard then you have to buy another copy of windows.
Now this means that My company should have bought two additional copies of windows for my PC at work since there have been two motherboard replacements. Apparently this provision has always existed in the software license agreement. So of course the bottom line is that a large proportion of people who think that they have a legal copy of MS Windows are in fact breaching copyright. Now tell me please why this is not greed at its worst?
Now this is where the crunch hits the fan. It was recently reported on The Register that the right to use MS Windows was locked inextricably to the motherboard on which it was origonally used. Now I have long known that the license said that you only had the right to use the software for as long as MS wanted you to use it, and that you could not sell it, give it away, which effectively means that if you sell your PC you cannot give or sell the copy of windows with it. But what this new revelation means is that if you change your motherboard then you have to buy another copy of windows.
Now this means that My company should have bought two additional copies of windows for my PC at work since there have been two motherboard replacements. Apparently this provision has always existed in the software license agreement. So of course the bottom line is that a large proportion of people who think that they have a legal copy of MS Windows are in fact breaching copyright. Now tell me please why this is not greed at its worst?
