[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Keith Abraham wrote: > Interesting for dual-booters? > > http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=84&tag=nl.e550 > > I'm glad my software is free. Hehe Last time I ran Windows update for a colleague at work, it presented me with a "Microsoft Pre-release" licence. I glanced at the first few terms, thought "I didn't run Windows update to install pre-release software" (given the quality of the released software - pre-release would be suicidal - surely Windows update is to fix all the security holes?), so I declined the licence. Turns out it was WGA that I declined - although the update tool doesn't make that clear when the licence is presented <sic>. Still it pays to read the small print, as whilst I'm fairly sure DELL ship legitimate copies of Windows, I have no faith in software licence keys. Mandatory licence keys are notorious for going wrong. I've squandered whole days of disaster recovery planning due to minor licence key issues. The 15 day 'hardware switch' relief that BAAN is suppose to give didn't give me any time at all on the DR hardware once - oops - guess that is why you do DR test runs. But this resulted in other DR tests being omitted due to time constraints. The HP Softbench team once admitted they had more calls on the licensing system (it used the default DCE cell by default, resulting in licence database corruption when any box with a printer plugged in sneezed, locking out 30,000 quids worth of software and making the developers lives painful), than they did on the product itself (which was a development environment for programmers - glueing together debuggers, editors, SCM, Make, compilers etc - so trivial to support <sic>. Oracle, notorious licence enforcers, have generally seen fit to enforce their incredibly expensive licences with visits from auditors, rather than mess around with software and screw up a perfectly good database for want of a magic number -- but hey I'd rather the proprietary software people make it as painful as possible for their users -- so don't tell anyone. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html