I bought a few Dell Power Edges - that came preloaded with Windows Server 2003 Small Business - because I needed the uptime/reliability of server hardware and they needed some proprietary Windows only apps.

When I was setting the computers up I had removed all the extraneous services (Active Directory, DNS Server, Exchange Server, etc), for security and performance reasons - and all was good.

Well, a week later I get frantic calls that all the servers mysteriously shutdown. After examining the event log I see a notice that: "The server was shut down because it did not comply with the EULA. For more information, contact Microsoft."

In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to shutdown my servers, with no notice, a week later because I had uninstalled the Active Directory server. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555087 for details. In what possible world did someone think this was a good idea?

And that is why I now only use open source software whenever possible. I'll gladly pay for it - I just don't want this kind of stupidity and user antagonism in my software.

This is exactly like me buying a car and then it shutting down on the highway after a week, because I haven't been using the cup holders enough.