Microsoft ended up on the wrong side of the law when EU and Korea decided to take a closer look at its Windows platform. This resulted in enormous fines for the software giant which eventually decided to release special versions modified according to demands. Microsoft even threatened to leave out Korea from future launches, but that doesn’t seem to be the case now. Microsoft will instead launch special versions for EU and Korea with more and better possibilities to choose how you want to use Microsoft’s own applications. Whether this will also affect the security functions we don’t know, but considering how much both Symantec and McAfee have been complaining we can’t stop worrying.
At the same time the final license agreement has been made official and as the rumors has said Microsoft has tightened the noose considerably. Ed Bott writes in his blog that Microsoft has now limited the installation to one primary computer and then you have just one more installation of this license on another “computer”. The last thing we heard Microsoft said that a new motherboard means a new computer, which will be completely devastating for enthusiasts and overclockers’ use of Vista. This will make it literally impossible to perform serious benchmarking of DirectX 10 systems.
To the server and workstation market this is just as fatal even if these don’t upgrade as often hardware does brake and then your left with a single reinstall before you need a new license. Microsoft will surely receive more than a ton of not so pleasant messages for choosing this path, but at the same time one has to understand that Microsoft wants to protect its creation against pirates, which it so far has been unable to do with Windows XP, despite its Windows Genuine Advantage.
