I have read Ed Bott’s fantastic article on Windows & WGA from this morning and almost exploded. What? How on Earth could something like this be legally possible to undertake? Shouldn’t this be the proverbial last drop before we see a massive migration to one of the Linux distros? We see stories about surviving without Windows pop up left and right; hell, this morning there was something about Linux becoming mandatory in Korea. And yet we cling on. Still, my intent is to analyze this move, not bash at it mindlessly (which may be the more appropriate thing to do).
1. WGA is poorly written. Months after it’s been released its code is still in Beta stage. I can think of countless times when I encountered problems because of the WGA mayhem. I’ve had it give me problems on an Advanced Server 2003, insisting that my copy of the server was not genuine, and although a call to MS resolved the issue, I was still forced to restore the fileserver to an earlier date, which was a nightmare considering that it also acts as my primary domain controller.