Is Onlive Pirating Windows and Will It Cost Them? 225
An anonymous reader writes "When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft's licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can't."
real ugly truth (Score:4, Insightful)
, the ugly truth may be that they can't.
Well, no, not in your crappy backwater country, and not with some locked down hardware like an ipad. But in more sensible and advanced societies like, er, China, these kinds of things are readily available, and cheaper too.
Re:Service Provider License Agreement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:real ugly truth (Score:4, Insightful)
False dichotomy.
Re:real ugly truth (Score:2, Insightful)
China, these kinds of things are readily available, and cheaper too.
Despite your trolling, you're right.
You can get Windows easier and cheaper in China even if it's streaming.
It's a lot easier to do things when you ignore patents and licenses.
Re:real ugly truth (Score:3, Insightful)
As messed up as our copyright and patent laws are
Stop. End of line. Thanks.
In China, human beings are largely regarded as disposable cattle
The United States was booted off the UN human rights committee and replaced by China out of its unwillingness to address fundamental problems like having the highest incarceration rate of any UN member nation, no journalist shield laws, carrying out a forced sterilization program on its citizens, and for numerous actions that are against the Geneva convention such as the torture of political prisoners and secret courts where people are indefinately detained or even executed.
I'll much happier put up with my government instituting silly policies like not allowing ripping of a DVD,
Under current legislation, downloading a song by Michael Jackson will earn you two more years in jail than the doctor who killed him. It's not a "silly" policy: It is a policy which is being selectively enforced, very often against scientifically and technically literate individuals who, as a community, generally have a more critical opinion of the government and maintain a more "liberal" mindset. In short: The laws is being used as a political weapon.
So don't give me that shit about how I need more training, you condescending jerk.
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
No open source software that I've seen handles docx halfway as well as Word 2007 and Word 2010. "Good enough", as in "this wordprocessing software is good enough for almost all needs" is a given, but that's not really the question. You're talking about sixteen or seventeen years of Office dominance here, coupled with Exchange. Do you understand the manpower that would be required to convert a large company from Office-Exchange to something else (assuming that something else was in fact an improvement in any real sense).
I'll concede right now that I loath Exchange. I hate it. I hate everything about. I hate how brittle aspects of it are, the bizarre dependencies with other systems like IIS which means if .NET/ASP takes a nosedive, your clients suddenly find out they've lost a whole lot of functionality. Believe me, I've had many sleepless nights over Windows because it's seemingly easy configurations are filled with pitfalls. I love the *nix world where you can got "cp worldsmostimportant.conf worldsmostimportant.conf.bak" and muck around to my hearts content with the config, knowing I can pretty much wipe out any changes by inverting the command and restarting the daemon. At heart, I'm a *nix man and have been for over two decades. I fit *nix and open source solutions in wherever I can.
But at the end of the day, my boss and my coworkers are expecting to walk in, log on to their Windows workstation, start up Outlook, work on their budget in Excel and read the latest business requirements documentation in Word. I hand them Zimbra and LibreOffice, and it's going to be nasty. Eventually I might calm the waters, but then someone is inevitably going to get some Word 2010 document with wild formatting and it's going to open up in LibreOffice like the dog just puked on the screen, and then I'm going to get demands for solutions, and the only solution is going to be "I guess we should have Word on there."
In the long term, Microsoft's dominance even in the business world will begin to wane, no doubt about it. As more tablets and smartphones make their way in, and the requirements of more open document standards and protocols become clear, things will change. But until then, and as ugly as it sometimes is, in the big world, Exchange-Office are still way ahead.
Re:They applied for a site license (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see by your UID that you're new around here but, for fucks sake, don't come off like that much of a chump at the same time too. At any given time about half the articles on Slashdot are based on speculation.
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously with Ubuntu Linux finally showing some decent polish and usability (yes yes I am referring to Unity which I have gotten used to) and OSX also available who really shives a git about Microsoft?
Anyone who needs to run Windows-exclusive apps.
In other words, most businesses and their employees.
Don't forget anyone who wants to play recent video games.
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Service Provider License Agreement (Score:5, Insightful)
Speculating about the terms is useless. There is no requirement that this customer uses a standard license or terms. Like Nokia they may have a special deal where Microsoft pays THEM per activated user, and now Microsoft is saying "er, wait. This isn't going how we thought so let's draw your attention to Paragraph 752, subparagraph 17 which reads 'offer void under the following conditions' and under codicil 3 of the 4th amendment was added the text 'if we say so'." We don't, and won't know the terms so there's no point in talking about it.
OnLive should have known better. Nothing good comes of bargaining with the devil.
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The developers are all using Visual Studio through Win2k8 Remote Desktop services on their Macbooks, and we're working towards having them develop completely in browser-based IDEs. We eventually plan on having only Windows on the server side (SQL server, CruiseControl CI autobuild environment).
Mind explaining why? Serious question... because it sounds like you're deliberately setting yourselves up to ensure that you have the worst of all possible worlds. Buying employees MacBooks so they can access Windows-only software through Remote Desktop, just by itself, sounds like madness. And yet if you really don't want to have a Windows-centric environment, one would think the servers would be the first thing to go off Windows. Is there anything in your whole environment that you haven't managed to kluge, hobble, or overspend on?
Re:Who shives a git!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Though MM may in fact use *nix solutions as stated, I find the opening line of that post is disingenuous as worded, so I've edited it here to make it more obvious what is being said:
No open source software that I've seen handles the Microsoft proprietary format docx halfway as well as the Microsoft native applications for the format, Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Bolding mine, to point out the obvious deficiencies of that argument.
I agree that your alteration makes his point clearer (although I'm unsure it was really necessary), but I'm not sure it's as much to the argument's detriment as you think. I'm probably going to come off as a Microsoft fanboy here, but so be it.
The reminder must be made that companies both create a legacy of existing files, and must use files by other companies. If you were to flick a magic switch, today, and have all your users understand a new suite of office applications and religiously save into an open format, you would in no way have solved your problems. Their blissful glee at being able to do what they were already doing but in a slightly different way would last until the moment they tried to open an existing file, or one from an external source, that "doesn't look right". And yes, I know I'm going over the same old points that get made, but I'd argue that 1) they're unfortunately still relevant, and 2) with respect, your own points aren't new either.
One additional aspect that usually gets skipped over is Microsoft Access. Yes yes, toy database, shouldn't be used in business etc etc, but we all know it does. I don't believe, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't checked in a year or two, that any of the open source suites can attempt to open .mdb files. There are now open source Access-like systems to create databases, but again, what do you do about the legacy information? With databases, it's even more likely that these may be currently used, critical files.
As you've said, the starting point is probably to begin using the open document formats in Microsoft products, until all the documents made with older formats are simply not relevant anymore; for my part, our company has only migrated a few users to a version of Office new enough to *have* those formats, so I'm stuck with .doc whether I like it or not. In the end though, it's rather amusing to consider that if, one day, we find ourselves in a situation where the majority of files are created in an open format and switching to an open office suite is easy, it's likely because Microsoft bridged the gap this way.
Re:Service Provider License Agreement (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not chump change if that's what you pay per person to offer a service for free to everyone on the Internet.
Onlive still works ? (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't quite understand OnLive's business model, or why anyone would go for it. I know how it works, they render everything server-side and send you compressed video - fine. The roundtrip latency is probably not all that bad, as long as you have a short route to the server. I'm fine with the technical aspects, but what about the money ? It seems to me like the only way they can make a buck is via mass pirating.
Those servers can't be cheap, each one is basically a mid-range gaming rig with a hardware video encoder, and can only serve one user at a time. Each needs a copy of the OS and games. You're basically renting access to a $1000+ gaming rig, plus bandwidth. Sure, the benefit is that just about any internet-connected device can now "play" PC games, but how does OnLive turn a profit ? Do they pool the game licenses so they only need as many paid keys as there are simultaneous players ? Or is this like all those ridiculous startups from the dot-com bust, where they spend fucktons of VC money and die a horribly quick death ?
Don't get me wrong, I like the technical merits of OnLive. Even as we said "this will never work", well surprise: it works amazingly well for many people. I just can't see how they can deliver this without charging fucktons of money for the privilege.
Where is onlive hosting? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the "you are not allowed to rent some software" licenses are invalid in many countries. So if they are hosting outside of US, it may be just okay.
Re:Onlive still works ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, because the free access is offered "as available", which basically means that it's a loss-leader, get people to start using it, as the use goes up, the availability of the free sessions become less, then the people who really want this (and I personally know a few) will start paying for it, and "viola!", you've got a business model.
It doesn't seem all THAT mysterious to me, but maybe I'm missing something.
-AC