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Can you help me with my software licensing issue?

My company has a SPLA (service provider) license with Microsoft. I am new to the company and those before me are now gone. I have access to Microsoft's volume license portal and can see our agreements with Microsoft.

My question is for post products like Windows Server 2008 R2 for instance we have a MAK product key with 1500 available activations. We use this to activate customer's servers that are provided/managed by us.

The problem is some customers who arent managed by us, dont want us to activate their OS for them. They want their own product key so they can activate when needed. We however dont wish to give them our MAK key with 1500 activations.

Are there any SPLA license experts out there that have experienced this situation and how they handled it?

Thanks

Community
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floyd
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  • They're free to purchase their own server license and activate it with that product key. – joeqwerty Jan 22 '13 at 21:16
  • See my answer - I am not sure it is a legal question ONLY. There is a TECHNIAL way to fix that without talking about legal, as SPLA gives him also a KMS, not only a MAK. Not handing over license keys to people renting equipment is sort of "not a legal questioN" when this is something that is in the documentation. The technical part is all that needs answering, can be reformulated to not be legal, and is solvable as per my answer. – TomTom Jan 22 '13 at 21:17

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Are there any SPLA license experts out there that have experienced this situation and how they handled it?

Yes, it is you. Get SPUR (Service Provider Usage Rights), start reading. Contact vendor who handles your contract, talk to them. Do not go to random forum where licensing questions are explicitly not wanted and ask there (hint: that is here). THAT SAID:

TECHNICALLY I would ignore the MAK and go KMS. You ALSO have a KMS key, set up an internal KMS and just tell them to point their machines to your KMS. That is "as needed". This solves both issues - the license is activated with a SPLA key, and you do not have to hand out your key to the customer.

This is at the end "How do i activate machines without customers seeing my license keys", and that is a technical question.

TomTom
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