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Can you legally run a web server on a desktop Windows OS?

C

Chicken76

Senior member
Even if running non-Microsoft free software to do so (like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc), can you legally run them on something like Windows 7 Professional?

The license states that only one user is allowed to use it at any point in time, and the point of a web server is usually to allow multiple users to access some content simultaneously.
 
sure, It use to be 10 concurrent network connections. i'm not sure what's changed in the ms world since the old days. so if that's still the case, user 11 that connects to the web server will be sol.
 
Hmm... 10 concurrent connections? Does that mean all torrent clients are to be run on server OSes only, because you get hundreds, if not thousands of incoming connections when seeding?
 
You can't legally do many of the things everyone does every day on Windows.

Straight from Microsoft's Windows 7 Professional license agreement:
Device Connections. You may allow up to 20 other devices to access software installed on the licensed computer to use only File Services, Print Services, Internet Information Services and Internet Connection Sharing and Telephony Services.
Click to expand...
Yes, you read that right. You are only licensed/allowed to have other "devices" (i.e. anything and everything) connect to those certain SMB and web services listed above. Everything else, including itunes, third party ftp and web servers, irc servers, even just hosting a multiplayer game (COD does this?), simply anything that allows another device to connect to your computer other than those devices listed above is "illegal". Makes me wonder if that also includes the Xbox media center features, but maybe Microsoft gives permission for that in the Media Center extender license, but that would certainly seem anticompetitive and have the DoJ and FTC on them by now, yes?

With that said, I say F them and go for it if you're confident it will work.

Or just use Linux.
 
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I would not worry about it, but why use windows when you can use Linux? Unless this is for work or something and you have no choice. Either way, you can adjust that in the registry. I remember having to do it for my torrent VM back when it ran on windows.

Also not sure if the 10 concurrent connection limit is TCP sessions, or if it's SMB/login sessions. If it's SMB sessions only, then you'll be fine for http traffic.
 
The only other problem may be that some software want a secure domain on the server, Vista and 7 cannot create domains.
 
Chicken76 said:
Even if running non-Microsoft free software to do so (like Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc), can you legally run them on something like Windows 7 Professional?

The license states that only one user is allowed to use it at any point in time, and the point of a web server is usually to allow multiple users to access some content simultaneously.
Click to expand...

I doubt MS would be able to legally stop you from running Apache on a workstation OS. Hell, a lot of OEMs run server software on workstations. Toshiba Strata MAS voice mail runs on XP. But if you use MS software, and probably some 3rd party software from dick developers, you'll either be limited (e.g. 10 or 20 concurrent connections) or unable to install it at all.

If you just want a LAMP setup I would suggest Linux, you'll learn a lot more and have more flexibility in the future. And if you install that into a VM you can just copy the files to whatever new machine you want without rebuilding everything and worrying about drivers.
 
Yeah, and it's actually easier in Linux. You don't even have to edit the config files anymore these days to get php/mysql/apache to work together.
 
I have spent a lot of time looking over Windows licences recently for the purposes of running a game server. The clause above was a concern and I specifically spoke to Microsoft about it. My discussion with MS came to the conclusion that the clause applies to Microsoft software. They do not put restrictions on the software that runs on the OS. Thus from this if you were to run Apache on Windows 7 that would be perfectly fine.
 
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