Customer-Friendly Windows Vista Virtualization Licensing--Finally

Here's a bit of good news, via All About Microsoft's Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft is about to loosen the licensing restrictions on Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium that forbid users from running virtual instances of those operating systems via utilities such as VMWare and Parallels.

At least it appears that Microsoft is about to do this. Back in June, the company told some journalists that it was going to make virtualization legit, and then changed its mind at the very last moment. I blogged about that flip-flop at the time, and had griped about the license restrictions in an editorial a few months earlier.

Why the switch, finally? Microsoft had said that it forbid virtualization of Home Premium and Home Basic because of concerns that virtual operating systems might open up security holes that hackers could take advantage of. Mary Jo's report quotes Microsoft as mentioning a vague "maturity" in the market that makes virtualization acceptable. But if there's been any technological change that eliminates the security concerns that Microsoft brought up in the first place, I don't know about it. Although back when I was reporting on the virtualization restrictions, I had trouble finding anyone outside of Redmond who considered virtualized operating systems to be more dangerous than ordinary ones, and Microsoft itself offers a free virtualization product whose Web site makes no mention of scary security dangers.

Of course, the hubbub has always been about software licenses rather than technological limits--operating systems don't know that they're being virtualized, so Microsoft wasn't able to prevent anyone from installing virtual copies of Home Basic and Home Premium. It simply told customers that doing so would violate the terms of the Vista software agreement.

It's good to know that we can now do so without fear of being accused of being crooks. I may upgrade the version of Windows on my MacBook from XP to Vista Home Premium. Although, come to think of it, the XP installation is running so well that I may leave well enough alone...

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