Wanted: a clue on Windows licensing

I don't know Eric Ligman, but he seems like a nice enough person. Yet you get a different picture from headlines like "Microsoft Exec Rages Against Vista Upgrade 'Hack' " and "Microsoft exec loses his cool on Vista upgrades." Ligman's problem isn't that he's some spittle-spraying madman, but he's trying to defend Microsoft's Windows licensing policies, which would make anybody seem a little crazy.

The computer press seems to be piling on. Jason Mick wrote in DailyTech, "In an openly sarcastic blog entry, Microsoft's Eric Ligman tore into users who have been exploiting a workaround to allow a Vista upgrade to install on a computer that did not previously have a Windows OS, such as a new PC."

And from Kevin McLaughlin in ChannelWeb, "Sarcasm can be a powerful tool, and a Microsoft executive recently wielded it against industry sources who claim that a loophole exists in one of the software giant's licensing policies."

The root cause of all this contumely is old news. More than a year ago in the Windows Secrets blog Brian Livingston described an 11-step technique for doing a clean install of Windows Vista from the upgrade version of the operating system. The reason you might want to do that was clear. Money. Livingston spelled it out in his article: the upgrade version was cheaper than the full version of Vista by $72 to $155.

Livingston didn't devote a lot of time to the ethical dilemma of using the upgrade in a way it wasn't intended for, but he did point out that a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, number 930985, that says an upgrade version of Vista can't perform a clean install when a PC is booted from the Vista DVD – which is obviously wrong, because Livingston was doing it. "It'll be interesting," he wrote, "to see whether MS ever explains why these steps were programmed in."

Earlier this month Scott Dunn wrote in Windows Secrets Vista Service Pack 1 didn't change the situation. Livingston writes in the current edition of his newsletter, "The fact that the trick still exists in SP1 — more than one year later — is strong evidence that at least some high Microsoft officials wanted it left in."

That's where the Ligman hit the fan.

Eric Ligman is Microsoft's US Senior Manager for Small Business Community Engagement, and he writes the Microsoft SMB Community Blog. Over the past couple of weeks he's written a couple of blog entries that took aim at Dunn and Livingston. He wrote in the first entry:

So if you see any of these people writing that buying an upgrade by itself (Windows Vista Upgrade for instance) without having a full license first gets you the rights to run the software, just realize that what the person is actually stating is, “I clearly have no clue what I am talking about and so I am writing a bunch of gibberish that proves this hoping people will think I have a clue, even though I obviously don’t.”

If they continue to tell you that, “But I can get it to physically install, so it must be legal,” this further shows their complete lack of comprehension. Just because something will install does not make it legal. For example, a pirated piece of software will (usually) physically install; however, running pirated software is 100 percent illegal (and who knows what else it will install on or do to your computer).

I tend to agree with his disagreement on ". . . I can get it to physically install, so it must be legal." But is doing doing a clean install with an upgrade version the same as running pirated software? He sort of lost me there. I can see the absolutist argument, but Ligman's out on a limb by himself. Livingston may have a little self-interest at stake, but he makes an interesting point: if Microsoft thought it was so wrong, why didn't they fix it in SP-1?

The problem is Microsoft's positions on licensing issues like this one are shrouded in ambiguity.

What, for example, did Microsoft intend when it turned off the Windows Genuine Advantage kill-switch in Vista SP-1? At least one blogger opined that WGA had presented Microsoft with an unintended side effect: it was boosting the use of Linux. He spun out a theory that Microsoft scaled WGA back to a nag screen because it would rather have people run pirated copies of Vista than legitimate copies of competing OSes.

Here's another example, a not-so-hypothetical case for Ligman: Let's say I've got Windows XP Pro running on an old, slow PC, something from 2001 with a Pentium III 1-GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and two hard drives, an 80GB main drive and and an 80GB secondary drive. I jack up the two hard drives and slip in a new motherboard under them with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU and 2GB of RAM.

My question is, should I buy a new copy of XP Pro? The OS installed on the hard drive was the OEM version, which means I can't transfer it to a different PC, according to the End User License Agreement (EULA). But I didn't transfer the OS to a new PC. In effect I transferred a new PC to the OS, right?

In any case, I'm not worrying too much about it because I figure Windows Genuine Advantage will let me know if the PC configuration has changed to such an extent that the copy of XP no longer validates, and until that happens I'm OK, right?

Or am I running a legitimate copy of Windows XP Pro that is actually pirated software by Ligman's definition?

I'm awash in the ambiguities of Microsoft's Windows licensing. So, apparently are Brian Livingston and Scott Dunn. Ligman may be right that we're all pirates. He's even more likely to be right that we haven't got a clue, though not in the rather rude sense he used that description. The problem is, it's his company that put us in that position, and it's going to take more than calling us names to resolve the situation.