OK, so now that Vista is released to the world, licensing apparently has reached a whole new level of pain-in-the-assness.

As a software developer, we use lots of different flavors of Microsoft OS’s and we’re given our development licensing through MSDN subscriptions.

Each and every PC that we’ve purchased has an XP license, albeit of the retail flavor.

We don’t use the retail license we have, it’s too big a pain in the butt every time a developer pooches a machine. So we install the volume license flavor because activation isn’t an issue.

The reality is, we have more licenses. More actual licenses than we use. If you count a retail license for every machine, plus all the MSDN subscriptions, plus our participation in the MS Certified partner program. You could audit us any day of the week and we have fewer licenses ‘IN USE’ than we actually have.

We do turn and burn machines on a fairly frequent basis, not to mention the all of the virtual PC’s our developers use. If we didn’t use the VL flavor, and had to jump through activation/deactivation hoops every time we installed we’d probably all be using Macs by now.

This has got to get better. If the OS is too cumbersome to install, activate, deactivate and manage, then we’re hosed.

The article below talks about a potential solution, but still I don’t want be ‘limited’ in the number of times I can do this and I shouldn’t be.

Consumer Vista licensing confusing? Check out the biz licensing by ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley — If you think the consumer Windows Vista licensing terms are confusing, the business licensing ones are even more complicated.