Windows 7 Modifies License Rights

With Windows 7, Microsoft continues to evolve the licensing rules for the product. Some changes will save customers money, others will increase costs, and customers will need to take them into account in planning any migration or upgrade strategies. Downgrade rights to the most popular current business OS, Windows XP, will be affected, and the company is wrapping most of its remote and virtualized desktop offerings into an extra-cost add-on, Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop.

Downgrade Rights Limited

An unusual provision in the OEM End User License Agreement (EULA) for Windows 7 will offer downgrade rights to both Vista and Windows XP. This is more generous than the downgrade rights that came with OEM versions of Vista, which allowed customers to downgrade only to Windows XP, the most-recent OS. In Microsoft parlance, Vista offered only an n-1 downgrade, where n is the current shipping version. (Note that customers who purchase Software Assurance [SA], Microsoft’s maintenance and upgrade rights license add-on, for the OS, including customers who have covered Windows on Enterprise Agreements, are not affected by these restrictions: SA confers rights to downgrade to previous OS versions as far back as Windows 95.)