How do you get a license for that? As far as I know you can't easily. You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one.

I don't understand why Microsoft is doing this. There's basically zero effort involved in setting up a credit card payment form that gives out product keys, and there'd be at least some demand for it.

>You need to find a reseller and there's a minimum amount of licenses you need to buy so you can't just buy one.

AFAIK you can get around that requirement by buying a bunch of cheap CALs.

Because they know that it'll be incredibly popular and will force them to continue backporting updates. They want to move forward and users want to stay on one place. In the past users managed to keep Microsoft from moving forward. Now they want to force users to move forward. Nobody is happy in both cases, it seems.

What I don’t get is that as a company, money should be their objective. They have people asking to pay money for a license, why not charge whatever it takes to make backporting updates profitable and call it a day?

>Because they know that it'll be incredibly popular and will force them to continue backporting updates.

I don't get it. How does popularity have anything to do with how much effort is needed to backport updates? Those editions already exist, so they're already committed to supplying updates. Might as well make some extra money by selling it for $300+ retail.

I had to go to Ebay to obtain a license.

But can I get that on my personal laptop?

You can pay for Windows updates by having ads, or by paying for Enterprise edition every year. Or realise that you should have switched to Linux already. Or overpay for your hardware and get a Mac, prepay for 5 years of OS updates today!

I pirated it.

I really hope you didn't harm anyone on the boat.