I am rein­stalling Win­dows on a few of the sys­tems here tonight and things are rapidly get­ting ridicu­lous. This is a not-altogether-abnormal house­hold in terms of com­puter own­er­ship (def­i­nitely on the upper side of own­er­ship, but I know fam­i­lies with­out geeks who have sim­i­lar num­bers of com­put­ers, just on a one-per-person basis), and it’s actu­ally get­ting impos­si­ble to keep track of things. Microsoft don’t offer domes­tic site licens­ing. But, damn, they should. I’m using Pro­duKey to audit licenses because I’m never going to affix those ridicu­lous OEM stick­ers to any­thing (so bite me, I’m a crim­i­nal) when they’re licensed with what­ever dodgy hard drive or net­work card I bought them with. Accord­ingly, I’ve lost the key (yeah, $AU200 value) of one sys­tem, and con­fused the keys of three oth­ers — because, get this, we paid for three legit aca­d­e­mic licenses which LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME AND DON’T HAVE STICKERS. So com­pli­ance on at least three sys­tems is ren­dered damn near impos­si­ble, even if you do fol­low all of their ridicu­lous rules to the letter.

Not to men­tion the OEM copy of XP MCE sit­ting in a draw that I’d lost track of (I think the sys­tem is now using a reg­u­lar XP Pro license) or the mis­cel­la­neous sys­tems that have affixed OEM licenses but for which there is no (mis­placed) phys­i­cal media.

Accord­ingly, if I want to obey the OEM sticker direc­tive, I’ve got to down­load a CD ISO from a tor­rent site (because I don’t fork out for MSDN). But MSDN is increas­ingly attrac­tive; it effec­tively offers the desired out­come. Unli­censed, unac­ti­vated sys­tems that work per­fectly well on a sub­scrip­tion basis… sure, subs suck, but when­ever they stop their XP acti­va­tion servers we’re all going to be screwed, any­way, so it hardly matters.

Mean­while, I’m sit­ting here mak­ing a list (on paper, which I’ll store with the phys­i­cal media) of all the licenses in use, and roughly where. Thanks to the unau­tho­rised rebuild­ing of sys­tems that I own and have built from scratch so often (resource­ful­ness in any­one else’s book, evil work of a pirate to the dra­con­ian OEM over­lords) what­ever descrip­tions are attached to afore­men­tioned sys­tems is likely to be ren­dered com­pletely untrue in eigh­teen months time when I once again get around to the whole­sale slaugh­ter rebuild­ing of them all. Inter­mit­tent rein­stalls will prob­a­bly hap­pen, too, unless I’m dri­ven so insane by the inabil­ity to dis­cern one license from another I end up, as I do now, sim­ply tak­ing out the lot and shoot­ing them all a new install.

To Microsoft: whatthe­hell­doy­ouwant­metodo? I am so not fork­ing out the at-least-$2000 you would have me pay for retail Vista licenses for this lot – it’s that much because Vista Busi­ness retail licenses come in at a deli­cious $500 each. Say it with me: hell no. I’ve heard from a reli­able sys­tem builder source that you’ve been telling them that the new OEM rules work in their favour as it’ll bring them more busi­ness. Sure, but it’s pretty crappy busi­ness if I don’t say so myself. I have absolutely no inter­est in becom­ing a Microsoft cer­ti­fied sys­tem any­thing, sim­ply because it’d mean deal­ing with your crap in a pro­fes­sional capac­ity, and I deal with it quite enough in a pro­fes­sional capac­ity try­ing to do other sorts of devel­op­ment as my job, thanky­ou­very­much. I’m not going to pay a Microsoft tax twice (first for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, sec­ond for indi­vid­ual licenses) just because you claim that your crappy sys­tem builders do it bet­ter than DIY-ers.

When­ever the time comes around to upgrade to Vista, if I ever deem it worth­while on the other home desk­tops here not for any com­mer­cial pur­suits (still run­ning Busi­ness in response to the crip­pling net­work­ing capa­bil­i­ties of all Home line prod­ucts), I’ll be mak­ing a trip to my local store, who, for what it’s worth, don’t even offer retail Vista Busi­ness for sale on their web­site, but men­tion the OEM edi­tion an awful lot, with the token “(only sold w/ new sys­tem or to a sys­tem builder)” tacked on to pla­cate any­one from offi­cial­dom who comes look­ing. I haven’t had the plea­sure of break­ing OEM conditions-of-sale (that’s all they are… are such things even legally enfor­ca­ble in this coun­try?!) just yet, but have no doubts there will be ample places that want to take my money when and/or if I do.

I’m actu­ally in the posi­tion of hav­ing one spare XP license (two if you count XP MCE) at this point, but am sorely tempted to install Linux on at least one of the three sys­tems I’m tak­ing care of tonight just to avoid hav­ing to deal with these mediocre attempts at extor­tion in the future. It’s not morally defen­si­ble to refuse to acknowl­edge sys­tem builders as “orig­i­nal equip­ment man­u­fac­tur­ers” when they are, in fact, con­duct­ing exactly the same tasks as their so-called ‘cer­ti­fied’ builders. Clearly, it’s not being pur­sued for retail sale: the only retail prod­ucts that belong in an oper­at­ing sys­tem prod­uct mix are upgrades for peo­ple who enjoy hav­ing com­put­ers that don’t work (i.e. most of the pop­u­la­tion, anyway).

It’s an indict­ment upon the dif­fi­culty of upgrading/reinstalling Win­dows that so few peo­ple take this route: quite frankly, the prod­ucts don’t work. Every­one who is unqual­i­fied (in the lit­eral, capable-of sense, not some arbi­trary dida­course, paidMS­somem­o­ney sense) to build a com­puter, in my expe­ri­ence, is unqual­i­fied to suc­cess­fully install Win­dows inde­pen­dently. Even if they suc­ceed at boot­ing from a CD, nego­ti­at­ing the installer prompts (admit­tedly bet­ter than they used to be), man­u­ally answer­ing ques­tions about day­light sav­ings and other such things that should long since have been dealt with automag­i­cally (c’mon, we’ve had GeoIP prod­ucts for what, ten years now? Longer?), or at least cor­rect from the out­set (two HP machines last week were insis­tent the default time­zone should be Sin­ga­pore. They shipped in Aus­tralia. Is it so bloody hard to pick a pop­u­lous east-coast state zone as the default?), chances of users cor­rectly installing things such as dri­vers in post-install stages are slim to none. Nearly all phone a tech-saavy friend (I know no-one who’s ever called the Microsoft sup­port line for OS installs… more should, but few do).

The point stands: retail licenses are for new­bies, OEM licenses should be acces­si­ble to every­one who doesn’t give a crap about shiny pack­ag­ing, man­u­als, and shoot­ing their wal­let to bits.

Here endeth the rant.