[MACEP] Parallels?

[Jake Rosenbalm]

A recent answer I sent out on Bootcamp/Parallels licensing may be helpful
when it comes to understanding Vista licensing:

Microsoft unfortunately has made Vista licensing on Macs a bit complicated.
With Windows XP, the Mac operating system OS X qualified as an upgradeable
operating system.  When Microsoft released Vista, they no longer included OS
X as an upgradeable operating system UNLESS you purchase Software Assurance.
What this means to you is you will need to buy a FULL version of Vista and
not an upgrade.  Additionally,  if you choose to use Vista through
Parallels, you cannot use Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium (by EULA
restrictions).  The editions Microsoft allows to be used in virtualization
software (Parallels) are Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise.  Microsoft
allows any version of Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate,
Enterprise) to be used under Bootcamp.

Parallels will run Vista and most Windows applications without an issue.
The nice thing about Parallels is you can have both OS X and Vista running
at the same time and share information (clipboard) between applications in
both operating systems.  With Bootcamp, you only have one operating system
running at a time, and must restart to access the other operating system's
applications.   The benefit of Bootcamp over Parallels is you have full
access to the computers hardware.  If you want to run games, multimedia, or
graphics intensive programs in Vista, you will most likely want to use
Bootcamp.

Also, Microsoft considers Parallels instances and Bootcamp instances as
separate machines requiring separate licenses.  We are hoping for some
movement from Microsoft in their interpretation but don't look for a change
in the near term.

Jake Rosenbalm
OETC

> If you install Windows XP onto Boot Camp along with all your Windows
> software, those same licenses are accessible on the Boot Camp
> partition through Parallels. The licensing for Vista has some
> weirdness about virtualization that I have not had to deal with, but
> this is a legal issue and not a technical one.
> 
> If you have a Macintosh version of a program you need to purchase a
> license for the Windows version as well if you will be using it, but
> you do not normally need to purchase two licenses for each
> installation of Windows. Read the EULA for each program to be
> certain, but most programs that come on "hybrid" CD's specify that
> you  may only run the program on one "computer" but do not specify if
> they consider a computer to be an instance of a distinct OS running
> on one physical machine or one physical machine.
> 
> So long as you have a Windows license for your Windows installations
> I would not worry about it. Are you *really* going to be running
> Photoshop Elements on the Mac and Windows sides simultaneously? I
> doubt it...