[kwlug-disc] MS in your kernel?

[Eric Gerlach]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 02:44:57PM -0400, unsolicited wrote:
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> L.D. Paniak wrote, On 07/21/2009 9:44 PM:
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>> Is this an opportunity for Linux?  Why buy Windows 7 when you can just
>> do a physical-to-virtual transfer of your existing XP install an run it
>> on Linux for free?  VMware has a lovely tool for such transfers:
>
> That's usually not true, license wise, these days. MS OEM licenses, such 
> as those that come with hardware, are one-hardware only licenses. You are 
> not permitted to use it elsewhere.

VMWare was having a bit of a "spirited" discussion with Microsoft about
this, because MS were licensing some of their software on a per CPU
basis.  Well, if you're doing a VMWare cluster with load balancing,
there could be over 100 CPUs that a particular VM could run on.

What this meant is that if you had 100 CPUs and 25 VMs, according to MS
you needed 2500 CPUs of licences!

Needless to say, even the big enterprise customers said "screw you" and
just bought one licence per VM.

Cheers,

Eric