They sort of already have. You can install Windows 10 without any key, and without registering.

There will be a water mark on the bottom corner of the screen, and a couple of the settings will be difficult to change, but all the upgrades work(if you want them) There is no expiration with functionality either.

You need a licence key if you want to customise your desktop, which is a big pain in the proverbial if you can't.

It is possible to set the background without entering a key, and there are a couple other things that are possible too, but it is far from easy.

I have the opposite problem. I run windows 7 on a low-end piece of hardware just for a home built arcade machine running emulators. It needs windows to drive the front end software (Hyperspin). Trying to run this on Windows 10 is a nightmare. The disk activity on win 10 is horrendously and slow, plus Hyperspin doesn't natively run on 10.

I had to reinstall win7 on that system recently, and it absolutely refuses to do the online registration for it even though it's a valid (MSDN) license key. I think maybe they took the servers down or something because I get a comms error. So now after 30 days it keeps popping up a dialog box every 10 minutes saying that "I may be the victim of counterfeiting". How helpful of them.

I still don't have a solution for this so if anyone has an answer I'd be glad to hear it.

KMSpico - emulates local network activation, install automation to repeatedly activate every month.

Second option is get a laptop/prebuild PC with Win7 key already burned into the bios and run your software on it.

The article does not discuss the revenue Microsoft is still likely making from selling Windows 10 to OEMs, which I imagine is why it has not yet done this.

Oh man, this is so stupid. If Microsoft gives away Windows 10 keys, it'll hurt companies like Dell and Lenovo who pay Microsoft to prebundle Windows. Guess who won't have to pay Microsoft to prebundle Windows? All of the cheap custom PC sellers on ebay and amazon. Everyone (except those who are so computer illiterate they can't figure out how to install Windows) will just buy a PC without Windows and install it themselves.

>Everyone (except those who are so computer illiterate they can't figure out how to install Windows)

Also known as the vast majority of users. They might manage if forced, but the vast majority of users are too scared to even try

I bought a Windows 10 Pro key for just 15 GBP a while back just to play Elite Dangerous. I ended up installing on my spare computer as the game wouldn't run under a VM hosted on Linux. No need to pay the full tax to Microsoft.

Grey market Win10 keys like this are probably a part of it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/373546396164

Edit: After reading article, indeed above method is noted. Also many people will never need to enter product keys since they're embedded in their hardware by OEM's...

Well in my case I've been using the same Windows Vista pro key for almost 15 years now, from Vista to 7 to 10