ghosting licensing

[Jonathan Hutchins]

---- Original Message -----
From: "Becker, Rob" <Becker at celeritas.com>

> An interesting licensing note on ghosting...
> I learned at an MS licensing seminar that OEM licenses of MS operating
systems do not grant you the right to use drive imaging software for
anything.  In order to have that right you must have an open license or
greater for that OS.  How ridiculous is that...

Yes, they are fighting hard against utilities like Ghost that make it easy
to make "unlicensed" copies of Windows installations.  We are currently
investing several thousand man-hours complying with this bullshit instead of
building one prototype and ghosting it, a process that takes ~4hrs + 15
minutes per end system, we are putting the full 4hr build into each machine.
STUPID!

One problem, though, is that Symantec has gotten stupid with greed on their
Ghost license policy.  As we understand it, if you ghost a machine, you need
a license.  If the machine goes bad, and you want to copy the same image to
it again, you need a NEW license.

We have switched to "Power Quest" imaging software.  The one trial run I've
done so far had serious throughput problems, but they may be hardware
related.