There I was... stuck in a bare maintenance room with nothing to read but
the blue EULA on XP Pro. (We realised that we had left the extra ram at
the office and my cohort was driving back to get it.)
Anyway, like 99.99...9 percent of all Win installers, I had seen the top
of that blue screen for years but never read it. Now I had a chance,
since there was not so much as a calendar to stare at. After reading
through it three or four times, I came to the following conclusions.
Unlike some current indecipherable EULAS, this one is fairly
understandable - to wit...
1. MS claims all rights to control its use.
2. MS claims all rights to inspect it at any time.
3. MS claims all rights to limit any use at any time, including uses that
haven't been thought of yet.
4. MS (apparently) insists that nobody connect to it with anything but
another legal windows OS (and only up to 10 users at once).
5. You have to contact MS within 30 days of installaton and tell them you
are using it. (Although this version of Pro doesn't have validation
function and never calls home).
6. You may not use this as a commercial server. (Didn't suspect this. Why
would they care?)
7. The Internet Gaming paragraph I did not understand, despite several
readings.
8. MS can download any DRM, including third party DRM at anytime without
your notification or approval.
9. If this product doesn't work, or breaks, all you can do is ask for your
money back, and only in the first 90 days.
Now, to compare with Debian's "Eula".
Debian may be used, altered, changed or reverse engineered, by anybody,
for any use, on as many machines as you can afford, for free, without
limits, forever... well, you get the idea. Just remember to reboot it
every few months to allow the hardware to be checked. (Windows has this
built in, since it either reboots itself, or is required to be rebooted on
an irregular schedule - usually about once a day or so.)
horizon
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