Surprises inside Microsoft Vista's EULA

Found on The Register on Saturday, 28 October 2006
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The next version of Windows is just around the corner, so the next time we discuss software licensing in my course, the EULA for Vista will be front and center. You can read the Microsoft Vista EULA yourself by going to the official Find License Terms for Software Licensed from Microsoft page and searching for Vista.

Worse, another requirement dictates that any benchmarks must "be performed using all performance tuning and best practice guidance set forth in the product documentation and/or on Microsoft's support Web sites," thus forcing testers to use settings that aren't found in the workaday world, potentially distorting results.

So you can't create a virtual image using Home Basic ($199) or Home Premium ($239). However, the EULA does allow you to use Vista Business ($299) or Vista Ultimate ($399). Hmmm... I wonder why? It couldn't possibly be because those editions cost more, could it? Wanna bet? The fact that there aren't any technical restrictions in place to prevent users from loading Home editions into VMWare, only legal and support barriers, sure lends credence to that supposition.

Section 6 also appears to block the opening and reading of documents "protected" with Microsoft's "Rights Management Services," which I covered a couple of years ago. Basically, this means that if you want to run a Windows version of Office inside Parallels or VMWare so you can create, read, and work on documents that have DRM'd, you're out of luck. Want to test Windows and DRM (those two great tastes that taste great together)? You gotta buy a new PC!

There I thought that the waste of resources by Aero would be the only reason not to get Vista. Seems like more and more reasons are coming. Virtualization is a big game now and offers tons of useful features, such as full system encryption (boot from a container) and easy backups (just copy the image). The reason why they ban playing DRM infected media in a virtual machine is pretty obvious: you could simply rip the content on the host machine and kick all their efforts to lock down the media you paid for.