Microsoft to stop producing Windows versions

Well but if you op-out you op-out of everything, including security updates. There's no "I want security updates but no random feature/interface changes" button.

My guess is they'll lock licenses to a hardware fingerprint numbers in some way (as they already do), so a new machine or radical hardware upgrades would require a new license [1]. OEM's would likely get bulk discounts on licenses and be able to pre-install the license themselves.

Basically they'd be betting the Windows franchise on enough people upgrading their hardware every year that fees from upgraders' new licenses could support all the free riders who didn't upgrade that year.

[1] Arguably the first sale doctrine means that this might not be a restriction Microsoft can impose at the legal layer. But they'd certainly to get around any such restriction by trying to implement it at the technology layer with DRM -- refusing to provide any supported way to move their license from one machine to another.

Of course any technological restriction will always boil down to a conditional jump instruction that can be patched out, which leads to a kind of "arms race" between the pirates and the DRM. Recently there was an HN article about a (rather old) piece of software which contained multiple piracy checks to sabotage the long-term user experience of pirated versions in a way that wouldn't be immediately obvious (so users would be punished for using illegal versions, but the long-term checks would be subtle enough to slip past crackers' QA and they'd likely ship partially cracked versions that didn't patch all the checks that needed to be patched). Including deliberately deleting user data after prolonged use: http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

This was news around January, I thought. Why are all the tech sites playing this up now?

I feel like i could reply to half the top level posts with this link:

http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-...

>January 30, 2015

> this is much more than a one-time upgrade: once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current via Windows Update for the supported lifetime of the device – at no cost.

>We think of this as Windows as a Service

>we are introducing a new approach for business customers, which we are referring to as the Current branch for Business. By putting devices on the Current branch for Business, enterprises will be able to receive feature updates after their quality and application compatibility has been assessed in the consumer market, while continuing to receive security updates on a regular basis. This gives IT departments’ time to start validating updates in their environments the day changes are shipped broadly to consumers, or in some cases earlier, if they have users enrolled in the Windows Insider Program.

>Based on what we are hearing from customers, we expect most will take a mixed approach in how they keep their Windows 10 systems up to date. They will likely target a different pace of updates for different users and systems, depending on the specific business needs of each group.

etc.

If you all can be 'squeaky wheels', microsoft et al will see that for relatively little overhead, they could have a lot of Austrialian people buying physical media.

Such a model would create an amazing marketing opportunity for a Linux based OS. Instead of paying an annoying monthly subscription you get a free office system built in. Not including such basic functionality with the OS is like selling a phone without batteries. Suddenly Linux becomes a premium product with lots of high quality software included compared to the annoying app store you get with Windows.