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Crazy that this information is so ... obscured. I had actually contacted Microsoft a year ago trying to do things the up-and-up way, only to get crickets in return. And still, bafflingly, what you found? That's an upgrade license.

It's as if the idea of people putting together their own PCs just never occurs to Microsoft.

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The target demo of those buying licenses wouldn’t be building workstations, they are buying prebuilt whatever and upgrading the entitlements from there.

MS very explicitly doesn’t target these releases to consumers, it’s entirely possible to do it by adding the 4 x useless products to get over the 5 x volume requirement. It’s sad, but not shocking they didn’t cover the edge case of a custom builder. If you were a firm building machines, you’d again get a special setup and do provisioning and key burning into bios etc.

It is a shame. I maintain my own PCs and the computers for a handful of people who are not technically ept (a friend who is rubbish with computers, my mother, and an eighty-seven year old woman who reacts poorly to the random UX changes Microsoft likes to push out).

I cannot help but think that there are a lot of "dark matter" sysadmins plunking away like me, just maintaining machines for friends or tiny businesses, and that we're underserved as a market segment.

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