Licensing

An OEM licence for the Fisher-Price OS (Windows) lives in the PC’s firmware as an ACPI table called MSDM, and QEMU will pass any such table to a guest without checking it. This covers what the table holds, a validator that refuses malformed tables before QEMU silently repairs their headers, storing them in the private half of the Proxmox cluster filesystem, Microsoft’s terms on moving an OEM licence, the one case they plainly allow, taking the table straight from the host when the licensed machine is the hypervisor, and why MAK, KMS, Active Directory and AVMA activation never touch the table.

Twenty years back you bought software and the copy was yours. Now you rent it, and the supplier sets the terms. Part 1 of 8 walks through how that happened, and why every step made it harder to go elsewhere.

The first 2 posts looked at what dependency costs you. This one looks at who else foots the bill: the volunteers keeping software going for very large companies, and the businesses bought, borrowed against and stripped back. Part 3 of 8, in plain language.