Double trouble for Microsoft as pre-owned software license claims converge ValueLicensing (VL) has been invited to attend a case management conference in a related multibillion-pound collective action against Microsoft, according to the reseller's boss, Jonathan Horley. VL sued Microsoft for £270 million in 2021, alleging that the software giant restricted the supply of surplus Office licenses …
to choose between throwing its hand in now at £270 million + up to £3.5 billion (plus costs) or struggle on and ultimately be up for more than double that (assuming only the current litigant are involved.)
My heart bleeds for Microsoft facing this dilemma… but I jest, I was thinking of the smallest violin in the world.
Aren't they already a way down this route?
Once they differentiate between the cloud and perpetual licenses (probably by rolling out regressive patches to the on-prem versions of Office), they'll just stop selling them, killing the practice of selling surplus older licences.
What they may be most worried about is the recent rulings that allow some customers to move their existing on-prem licences into the cloud for reduced or no cost.
microsoft has already made non-monthly-subscription licenses to use, no longer available for any recent version of office.
Older office versions on macos and ios have already lost the ability to edit and/or save, due to the expiry of a certificate and intentional choice not to renew such cert (that was the plan anyway); https://davescomputertips.com/ms-ending-perpetual-office-licenses-july-13/
Only the old; "Office Home 2024" is available; https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/CFQ7TTC0PQVJ
Notice that it says; "For non-commercial use" - although that's advice and not (yet) added as a restriction to the license terms; https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/documents/office/2024-word/retail-(packaged)/Microsoft%20License%20Terms%20Office%202024%20-%20English.pdf
(Sneaky move there, implying that the LGPL's are "open source" licenses, without making such false statement - those are free software licenses after all).
Older office versions are by design useless when trying to handle files by newer office versions (and also when trying to handle files from other computers of the same version and the same files on the same computer, but still) - I reckon libreoffice has better MOX-2026 rendering compatibility than office 2024.
o24 will automatically get worse at rendering, with further sabotaging changes to the MOX format in o365, without microsoft even needing to roll out sabotaging updates to o24.
m$ is not worried about a few subscriptions being activated on clown computers (they'll stop such if they can, but if they can't, sooner of later the designed obsolescence will bite anyway).
microsoft has never sold perpetual licenses for anything.
They've always sold temporary licenses to run, although not labelled as to the date when the software would likely stop working by.
adobe never sold perpetual licenses either - they have in the past sent threatening emails, that suckers "are no longer licensed to use" old versions of adobe software (that was not under a recurring-payment subscription service); https://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/is-old-licensed-software-legal-kryptonite-lessons-from-the-adobe-letter
microsoft already does subscription disservices - office for example.
The windows tax has always been a recurring payment anyway - hardware is made totally unusable to operate after x years and then it's time to buy a new computer, with the windows tax.
