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Legal might not be the right word here. Possible perhaps.
I guess you're using the trick where you use the same windows licence both on the host and in a virtualbox VM. That isn't kosher by MS's licencing policies.
Does it matter? That's between you and MS.
To be above board you need either a valid licence through SPLA, a valid licence through a Microsoft account logged in to the VM or a datacenter licence covering the whole physical machine. One key point (pun not intended) is you can get a lot of MS product licences by subscribing to E3/E5 subscriptions, which you might be eligible for free if you contribute to Microsoft's various GitHub projects, which could be as little as raising valid issues or contributing to documentation. Typos or meaningful improvements, MS aren't all that fussy. Do with that what you will.
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in offering windows licences at all and could be totally wrong here.
You can probably ask 5 different people about windows licencing and get 5 different answers.
Edit: for developer use or personal use (where you contribute something to MS at least every few months): https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program
You need an 8 year degree to understand Microsoft licensing and then it'll change halfway through the program.
It would be a great question to ask the Microsoft CEO at the annual shareholder meeting and watch him fumble through an answer.
If you have Windows 10 Enterprise w/ Software Assurance - you can run guests on the local machine without problem. (or, if you're on 10 Enterprise via E3/E5). Note - this does not mean all volume licenses, this depends heavily on your volume licensing agreement or MPSA.
If you don't - you can run them without much worry because Microsoft aren't generally in the business of enforcing licenses on consumers. It's not worth their time or effort - especially as they are more of a service business these days (a retail Windows license isn't their bread & butter).
In the enterprise, they care more - they can drag big license fees out of you and would much rather you fork it over. Plus, if you're doing business and you want not to look like a great idiot - being licensed and not being hauled over the coals by MSFT is a good idea. The cost of enforcement vs return is much higher here.
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Eh. I think the CEO having detailed knowledge of a batshit insane program isn't really to be expected. They'll be responsible for things on a much more big picture level.
Not going to happen.
The 2021 meeting was virtual and it was essentially a presentation: https://central.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/vsm/web?pvskey=MSFT21
Big company annual meetings are pretty much the same in person. Sometimes in previous meetings MSFT has done Q&A but it's filtered by a moderator. He's not going to filter anything the CEO doesn't want to answer. Heck, the CEO might pick the questions for all we know. E.g. from 2019:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2020/2019-Annual-Shareholder-Meeting
Some companies do allow shareholders a turn at the mic but a lot of companies, particularly big ones, don't. For one thing, CEOs don't want to go through that, and the board/CEOs set the rules for the annual meeting. For another, who cares what most shareholders think. When you're Microsoft's size, 70-80% of your company is held by institutional investors (e.g., 72% in Microsoft's case). If Calpers wants to ask you a question, they get to ask a question. If you own 1 share out of 7.48 billion, who cares what your question is
Yes, I know, you're part owner, blah blah but really.
A counterpoint to this is Berkshire Hathaway, where its billionaire CEO sits for hours answering any question shareholders want to ask him.
Of all the big publishers, no one can hold a candle to Computer Associates but no one buys their crap any more. Microsoft is probably the second most byzantine. Even Oracle is simpler, and that says a lot.
The answer is very simple:
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9231
The licensing mechanism is a simple BIOS/UEFI table entry passthrough, in where the
OEM product key is present:
https://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/the-oem-product-key-and-oem-system-locked-preinstallation/
KVM doesn't provide such mechanism, as it uses SeaBIOS and not the host BIOS.
So it's neither magic nor ancient, MacOS has a similar mechanism, where you can freely
virtualize a Mac on a Mac, but when you pull it on another Intel this would be considered
piracy, aka Hackintosh.
I don't have MS Windows licenses on most of my PCs as they are self built and run Linux, yet I can still run Windows fine on them in VirtualBox...
Doesn't matter what they currently run, the OEM has SLIC tables inside the BIOS.
This is exposed to userspace in /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find-windows-10-oem-product-key-command/
On laptops, where Windows comes preinstalled, it means Virtualbox is able to passthru
activation data to guests.
kms and rdpwrap.
i really want to see microsoft come after me for "violating license agreement", something that i didn't pay for, thereby didn't agree to in the first place. i know the whole "use is deemed as accepting license agreement" but it would be a fun thing.
windows 11 licenses are being charged at around 11k Inr these days on oem websites like dell and hp.
i have switched over to linux for quite some time now but i do have to use windows because of certain softwares but other than that,