Mickey Wrote:Not sure, but I think it's pretty stupid they didn't add some serial protection, I mean they couldve easily blocked the leaked serials and assigned new ones to real beta testers.

retail server 2008 can install with no key for 45 or60 days.

i think its some beta testers releasing it.  When i was official 98/2000/xp beta tester there was a new build everyday that could be downloaded via microsoft ftp.  the cool thing is they even snail mailed me cds :D

My thoughts on why it's deliberate:

How many internal developers have access to all the code?  For those that do, how many are willing to risk their position?  Furthermore, why would they package it up and distribute it in a nice installer?
A possibility is testers, but still, it seems weird for them to package everything up into an installer, only just to unpack everything.  I'd assume they have some incremental compilation system (basically only recompiles components that have been updated) and I would assume this would be linked to test machines to cause them to update when changes have been made.
It's possible they do this, but seems unlikely that they'd go to the effort of packaging things up nicely.

Also, there's the timing of these things too...

Maybe they'r just being nice to make up for the previous OS,. VISTA. :)