Wow, I guess that makes sense. But if they were going to move to a significant count of Linux machines I would assume that an enterprise edition (like red hat) would probably be covered by insurance. Since they then have someone to blame.

We have had success with this on port 443 and it appears to do a good job on networks that only allow browsing. Usual problems with TCP based VPN still apply.

I saw this on a few sysadmin posts, from what I saw and what people described I have a theory that it was an unexpected interaction.

Those with the deletion had a expiration date for the donation licenses past the July '26 deadline. That shouldn’t have happened as far as I can tell from the notification email. We had some of these, but I think the difference was the presence of other licenses.

Those with only the 10 donations and none of the other free licenses, would have become unlicensed when they were removed. There is a cool off for deletions, but if the licence had the wrong expiration, then the deadline date might have been set from the original expiration. Due to the incorrect extension that date might then have been in the past. Leading to the wrong deletions.

I have no way to confirm any of that and ms are not going to admit it. I don’t think it was malicious, but is still a appalling show from Microsoft.

It converts it from being something someone said, into something you can point at and say “we have evidence of it happening.”