On 12/16/20 8:11 AM, Lamar Owen wrote: > On 12/15/20 1:24 PM, R C wrote: >> What I meant was that MS basically, for the longest while, had their >> OS pre-installed on computers sold, so it "felt" free to the buyer, >> it came with the machine. Universities and colleges did receive bulk >> licenses and .NET pretty much for free in their 'Developer Programs' >> and also have students keep using it. That "faillure to implement" >> obviously was a marketing move indeed, as was students "allowing" to >> keep using it on their laptops after graduation. > This is way off-topic, but there are two aspects of home users using > unlicensed copies of Windows: > 1.) Users who bought a machine with Windows Home Edition on it who > wanted either Professional or Ultimate; > 2.) The enthusiasts who were building their own machines from parts. > That group is small, but they also tend to be very vocal; IT > professionals often fall into this group, and MS wanted to keep them > happy for all the reasons previously posted. > > But the Red Hat-based ecosystem version of that second group is > on-topic, as the same sort of enthusiast exists here and has been very > vocal about this change. > Well yes it is, but it started with a remark about licensing. I don't use Windows much, not even a handful of times in the last decade. Thing is that MS has something called their "Developers Network" (named something along those lines). If you're in higher education, R&D etc you can be in that network, in sortof an R&D category, for 'free'. As a member you get access to "development versions" of pretty much anything MS, and they will give you product codes, even "bulk licenses", to be used for R&D, and even for educational purposes. You can do whatever you want with it, except of course use it for commercial/production purposes. I never found a mechanism like that for redhat, that is why I use Centos. It is pretty much the same thing. I have numerous netboot images around, a dozen and a half or so hardrives with Centos installed (in trays), so it is easy to just boot a machine for projects, testbeds etc, and without having to pay for a bunch of licenses while you only use a handful of installs at a time. For example, I was messing with kubernetes in a few ways. redhat provides a license for RHEL, that you can use for that purpose for free, BUT you can have only have one license. Of course there is the group of people like you mention, (I probably fall in that category by swapping hardware all the time, testbeds, R&D clusters etc) I don't know how well that will be working with RHEL, if Centos and Redhat start 'diverting' > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos