Where do you get your new system licenses?

muzicman82 said:

Doing a quick Google Search also landed me on a few sites that are selling licenses for super cheap like $26 or something. Are these legit?

Mostly not, but it can help your consequence, that you have bought it, not stole it.

EU made the law, that you can resell used licences, 7-8 upgraded to 10, is a cheap 10 licence.

I have got Home and Pro for $10 each and I do not complain, neither do people, who use them.

Can you resell software licenses? The latest legal position in 2016 | The ITAM Review

The European Court has restated the legality of the resale of software in Europe

No, they are not...

Law is a conundrum whichever way one looks at it...cross-country makes it even more complicated.

OEM purchased is not for home use.

The $26 keys are (most likely) MSDN acquired that will expire as soon as it's activation count is exceeded (from sale to others...) DL may be different tho' as it's perpetual for the installation.

Your local Bestbuy sells W10.

Superfly said:

No, they are not...

Law is a conundrum whichever way one looks at it...cross-country makes it even more complicated.

OEM purchased is not for home use.

The $26 keys are (most likely) MSDN acquired that will expire as soon as it's activation count is exceeded (from sale to others...) DL may be different tho' as it's perpetual for the installation.

With Windows 7 and 8 installations from these sources, is that going to matter if a genuineticket.xml is created in the upgrade to 10, and the Windows 7 or 8 is never used thereafter, having served their purpose of activating 10 and giving a digital license to the machine?

Windows 7, IIRC, does not even need to be connected to the Internet to activate, so if installed offline, then upgraded to 10 offline, will pass as genuine, whatever the state of the 7 license on Microsoft's databases of blacklisted product keys - the key will never be passed on to Microsoft by Windows 10.

I've not seen a Windows 10 upgrade from an OEM 7 or 8 installation (OEM SLP or COA) that betrays its origin as OEM - all have RETAIL channel appearing in the license with slmgr /dlv :)

The 15-25% of Microsoft's OS revenue that comes from "domestic" purchases either of retail software or that that the OEM outlet pays MS for Windows (75%+ being commercial OS sales) is counterbalanced by the domestic CB userbase doing final bug detection via WER (as well as the well-established Insider Program!), self-training in the use of the most recent Windows releases, before Industry/commercial and public sector userbases pay the horses share of revenue when they uptake the stable CBB versions of the OS.

Yes, Faf.. you are correct... hence my qualifying statement regarding DL..

According to the EULA an OEM upgrade retains that licence... however, with DL ALL become Retail (which reliquishes the OEM from support) that is what makes interpreting it fuzzy.

...therein lies the dilemma.

BTW.. I can't see the sense of reselling OEM licences as they are PC specific and should not activate on different hardware.

I guess that Microsoft has to estimate demand for OEM licenses when a new OS is produced, and generate the product IDs for their Licensing database in batches for each edition. If they underestimate demand it might be tricky, so they probably allocate too many in each edition for a new OS. If there is this oversupply, as the product ages in terms of its lifecycle, MS can still make money off them if sold off cheaply enough in bulk batches to interested parties - like the guys who sell them really cheaply from China on ebay etc. OEM would typically be cheaper than retail, but still retain some value.

Windows 10, not strictly having a product key, in most cases, probably alleviates that problem for the foreseeable future.

You'll probably know more about this than most folk, Craig, but from the 32^25 = 42,535,295,865,117,307,932,921,825,928,971,026,432 possible permutations of the 25 character product keys Microsoft uses, some must be already used, others blacklisted and others with invalid configurations, I guess.

I don't know how you can tell if a particular licence belongs to a particular version and edition for instance. Are they encoded in the product key, or is that information stored on the licence databases?

I doubt if MS will ever enforce EULA terms on individuals, the function of the EULA is to act as a deterrent to would be AAArrrh! merchants, and use against mid-range criminals who are not smart enough to avoid getting caught.

Faf, the algorithm is quite complicated but yep, the version and edition is stored in the key.

Superfly said:

Yes, Faf.. you are correct... hence my qualifying statement regarding DL..

According to the EULA an OEM upgrade retains that licence... however, with DL ALL become Retail (which reliquishes the OEM from support) that is what makes interpreting it fuzzy.

...therein lies the dilemma.

BTW.. I can't see the sense of reselling OEM licences as they are PC specific and should not activate on different hardware.

My theory (and that's all it is) is that, that is done because once you upgrade to Windows 10, Microsoft becomes your tech support. The OEM that sold you the device with Windows 7 or 8 isn't going to even want to talk to you once you upgrade from the factory installed OS. Most won't anyway. They will just tell you to call Microsoft. And if you get online with Microsoft and it came back as still showing as OEM, they will say contact the manufacturer. I'm referring to the flow chart tech support.