Submitted by rich_c on June 18, 2009 - 6:04am
Out of curiosity, I was reading a few articles on the web discussing Microsoft’s EULA. I spotted one particular part that I suspect is very easily violated, at least according to my interpretation.
I refer to the first section under the additional license terms in the Vista EULA. This refers to the maximum number of external devices you may attach that use various services on ‘your’ PC. Depending on which version of Vista you have, this may be 5 or 10.
So, lets look at services that deal with file and print. There are other services that deal with internet sharing that get mentioned, but I’ll ignore those for now. OK, so you have a printer attached. Maybe you use a few external drives? In our household we regularly use at least 3 flash and external hard drives. We also have our primary Vista machine attached to a PC acting as a file server on the local network. OK so they may not all be active at the same time but I think I’ve demonstrated that once you take into account phones and cameras that you might attach from time to time, you’ll soon hit the limit of 5 and a lot of people will exceed 10. Especially if it’s a PC where various members of the family connect their own phone/camera/flash drive/mp3 player.
IANAL, but nowhere in the specific section does it mention that the limit refers to devices attached all at the same time. Therefore, I assume nearly all Vista users have in fact breached this particular term. If Microsoft want to send me a letter asking me to remove Vista from our PCs due to violation of this, I’ll gladly comply…
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