MonitorWare Knowledge Base

My company owns a network currently with 28 PCs and an older server that uses windows 2000 Pro.
I am building a new server and I want to use windows 2003 server 64 bit.
The server will basicaly serve as a file server. Why do I need to buy CAL for each PC on the network? They all have windows XP on them.
We already paid microsoft for the operating systems why do we have to buy again?

If I remember correctly you don't have to. I think those are meant for non-windows based machines. Every copy of windows xp already has it's on CAL. I could be completely wrong, but it sounds right.

I think its actually the case that you need to purchase cals.

Why that? Because MS wants you to. There is no inner logic in licensing. These are the conditions that Microsoft licenses under and you can either accept them or ignore them. I personally do not like the CAL idea, at least not for for machines where already money was paid for (thus our own software does not require CALS for machines that runs another part of the system - but that's a totally different story).

Sorry for the bad news...

Rainer