this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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OK I'm a little shocked here, how does this work? Back in the day when licenses were harder to come by, we used to use cracks / activators that would patch some binary or exploit some bug to activate. Is this .. an open source version of that?
Then it'll probably shock you even more when you realise that this thing is hosted on Github, a site owned by Microsoft... :)
I’m not sure exactly how it works. I haven’t used it in a while now. It has several different options to activate, including hardware id or setting up a local KMS server. I only ever had to use it one time, per windows install, and it would keep windows activated. It also has a tool to switch windows versions, i.e. home to pro. It is fully open source and their wiki goes into more detail. https://massgrave.dev/
MS just doesn't care anymore, because they make their money mostly with cloud and data now.
I believe it works by obtaining a real licence from Microsoft servers. Since MS wants to get everybody to move from 7 to 10/11 the only thing required to upgrade a win 7 install to 10 or 11 is an installation ID. And you can reuse the same installation ID infinitely.