Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeape | Hacker News Reader

So far none of the available images use Windows. All are GNU/Linux, most Ubuntu.

Since this is Microsoft I had expected to see some Windows VMs. I assume Azure supports Windows?

What makes this interesting is the fact that Microsoft is actually releasing and promoting Linux images with open source software... They know they need to push Linux in order to effectively compete with AWS and they are acting on it

Is it legal to publish Windows VM images?

Certainly--there are several legal ones floating around to allow testing of the IEs.

Apple is the only company that forbids virtualizing its OS (unless you're virtualizing it on OSX).

AFAIK, the VMs for testing IE are published by Microsoft.

In general I don't think you're allowed to publicly redistribute Windows VM images. Publishing a customized VM image in the AWS or Azure image depots may be allowed though.

AWS has Windows images available for sharing.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide...

Dos anybody knows if AWS has some special arrangement with Microsoft? For example do they collect licensing fees on behalf of Microsoft when you run the WM and thereby are except from the normal licensing rules?

Or can I also make public available Windows WM images and publish them legally from my website?

Yes, they have a special arrangement with Microsoft. That is why you will see that it is more expensive to run Windows-based instances on AWS than it is to run the free Linux OSs (Amazon Linux and Ubuntu, for example.) You can put together and publish your own AMIs for Amazon based on Windows, but users can't download and use them (as with all AMIs) - they just deploy them to Amazon and then they would be paying the additional hourly fees.

Presumably it's legal for Microsoft to publish them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com