Here's a link to Vista's just completed licensing terms. Attached is the Ultimate version's PDF. Page 6, #15 is the point we're interested in.

More interesting responses here. We're not alone!

Can I suggest everyone shoots over there, registers and makes a comment - the more feedback MS product managers get the more likely they are to change things before VISTA is formally released. Once the EULA is actually in force the chances of getting anything changed are probably minimal so shout now for all you are worth.

As far as I recall, the licence is for the lifetime of one motherboard.

They can make you do this, if you use their product.

Retail is tedious for them.  They want to deal with PC manufacturers who buy a million licences at a time, or big corporations who buy into their rolling upgrades program - which annoyed a lot of people when no upgrades were rolled, so you were buying nothing.  But they can make you do this.

They are addicted to money, I think.  PC industry growth was sky-high for years and Microsoft revenue soared.  There was never anything like it.  But once everyone has a PC and a copy of Windows, what can you sell them?  How do you keep the money addicts, the shareholders, happy?  Well, you sell a new version of Windows, and you try to get more money from each customer every time.

In this they aren't different from other businesses.  Everyone wants to get money from customers.  But Microsoft has special ways to do it - lock in the customers so that to participate fully in society, to pay your taxes, to draw your salary, to access public media, you have to use Microsoft software.

Home software rental is coming, I'd say.  There may even be PCs with coin slots.

The other "mandatory" that I was talking about is what happens if the WGA check fails to reach the activation server, due to limited or no internet access (a fairly common occurrence in offices). If MS makes the reaching of the server mandatory as well, then WGA is going to break for a lot of people. I find it hard to imagine MS wanting to go this far, but maybe I just need a more fertile imagination.

Hopefully they will have the sense to have a server check in WGA checking so that if the server is unreachable they don't do anything at all. Maybe they could insist that a check has to be completed within 3 days (as for reactivation now) but then the responsibility is with them to make sure their servers are never down often enough to cause problems.

Carol, interesting article. I agree it raises some good points and alternate perspectives. I don't think the case for kernel access is made entirely convincingly, but it's swayed me a bit more than Mcafee and Symantec's ravings, at least. Quotes like this are a bit too blanket and misleading though

That means zero bugs in all the Vista kernel code, zero bugs in all the drivers that Microsoft supplies, and zero bugs in any third-party drivers that you happen to install. If a single one of those pieces has a bug, then the bad guys can get into the kernel.

As if *any* bug in a driver would cause a vulnerability. No, IE, Windows, etc. have 1000's of bugs - a relativey low percentage are exploitable vulnerabilities! Nonetheless I would agree that vulnerabilities will exist. The only question is whether they can be patched. If so then I still think that's the best solution, provided patches are timely. The real issue the article raised is whether Symantec, etc. products without access to the kernel could clean a kernel infection, and I'm guessing not. That seems like a much more legitimate reason to have kernel access than pre-emptive scanning IMO. It seems like there is much less of a chance of a good workaround for that.

- Oshyan