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Not quite the same[ Parent ] (none / 0) (#3)
by Anonymous User on Tue Nov 15, 2005 at 11:15:44 AM PDT

The vehicle laws you're referring to affect your right to operate that car in that state - they don't affect your ownership of the car or your right to use it otherwise.  So you tint your windows too dark - you still own the car, you can still break it down to parts, you can sell the parts or the whole car, you can further modify it, you can start it up, you can even operate it on the roads - though you risk a fine in doing so.  It's still your property.  If you lose a wheel, you can put another on and it's still your property.

That's quite different from the Windows case where, if you are unable to use the same motherboard, your rights to the software cease entirely.  You effectively do not own it anymore (if, as "licensing" would have it, you ever did at all.)  Notice that we're not talking about *modifying* Windows at all.  We're talking about using it, as is, as Microsoft built it, on a different computer.  It seems to me the two are entirely independent entities (Microsoft didn't make the motherboard and vice-versa), but apparently the vendors disagree.

This is just part of the continuing effort of software vendors to manipulate the terms of sale to their greater benefit.  It has been going on for years.  Though I don't expect it to happen, I'd like to see a return to the time when software was licensed to the user (or number of users) rather than to the hardware - particularly now that dual- and multi-core machines are coming out.  Vendors are gearing up to charge multiples of the base price for one license to the software that runs once on a computer - just because it happens to have multiple cores in it.  The program still runs only one copy, and has the same number of users as it would in a single-core machine, it just runs faster.  So why should we pay more for the same software on different computers?


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