Eli5 what are licenses on operating systems?
In: Technology
A license is something that validates the software as legitimately purchased, and used for the purposes of the license.
There can be a lot of different licensing available. For instance, there might be educational licensing that is only available to educators or students PCs. A home license might state that the system cannot be used for for-profit endeavours. A license for Mac OS states that it can only be installed on approved Apple hardware.
There are two way licenses are validated. The first is at a software level. An OS without a license will limit features. In old versions of Windows, it would block access to Windows Update. Nowadays, they instead lock the desktop wallpaper and nag you to install a license (The bad press from constant viruses targeted to old OS’s that weren’t getting updates really sucked).
The software-based license check doesn’t actually check if you meet the terms of the license. That is done by audits. Large companies can be the subject of random audits to make sure they are in compliance with OS licenses, if the vendor feels there is a reason to believe they aren’t being honest with them.
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