[NTLUG:Discuss] NTLUG Linux Fair

[agoats at compuserve.com]

Microsoft just likes to lurk and then strike. The city of Virginia Beach 
was hit with licensing and had to pay out $129,000 (as I recall the 
original articles that are no longer available, they had MS-DOS based 
embedded software in traffic light signals and a few other such things 
that they couldn't prove they had licensing for).

Microsoft has lawyers who work hard at wording that requires a court to 
interpret, so the license may seem like it allows you to run the 
software on a virtual machine, it might not be true when interpreted by 
court.  The following links are the closest I can get to the original 
papers and the links on their pages aren't valid (too old, going back to 
2000 - 2002 time frame).

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/cs3604/lib/Copyrights.Patents/VABeach.html
http://slashdot.org/story/00/12/01/0532206/Virginia-Beach-Pays-Microsoft-129000
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/slicense.html

The current bully group is the "Business Software Alliance" who will sue 
anybody they think is "stealing" their software. Lose a copy of the 
license or get rid of a computer with the license sticker and retain the 
hard drive with OS installed and you're BSA fodder.

Shortly after paying out tax payer money to Microsoft, the city of 
Virginia Beach supposedly removed all Microsoft software from the city 
and put open source or others in it's place (Mac, Sun, Linux, BSD, 
OpenDOS). Can't find a link to this now.

Alvin

Rev. wRy wrote:
> thats the awsome thing about lawyers - if you can afford one they will tell you what you want to hear.
>
> :-)
>
> R
>
> Sent from my Samsung tablet
>
> Fred <fredstevens at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Sat 23 Apr 2011 Wayne Walker <wwalker at solid-constructs.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> "4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software         
>>>                                                                       
>>> installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise
>>> emulated) hardware system." 
>>>       
>> We run XP in the virtual machines. Our lawyers have told us that
>> what that clause says is that if a computer comes shipped with Vista
>> you cannot use the same licensed copy in a virtual machine running
>> on that computer but since we are running Linux on the computer then 
>> all we need are licenses for each virtual Windows system. Don't think
>> the software police are going to worry since MickySoft has been paid
>> their royalties, especially on a non-supported and out-of-date OS.
>>
>> Just my (and my lawyer's) opinion, of course. YMMV.
>>
>> Fred
>>
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