Sahil Malik points out that Microsoft has found a way to distribute Virtual Machines for Windows by time bombing them. In fact, they now have quite a number of them available for download.

Sahil has another request, to be able to do the same himself:

Extend that time bomb mechanism, so parties other than Microsoft can play. I should be able to create a solution based on MSFT technologies, and hand over a VHD for the world to play.

That is something that I would like to see very much. My company has a lot of virtualization stuff going on, and I would be very interested in being able to legally distribute a VM that can be use to boot-and-go in various scenarios.

I would like to add another request to that, not only do we need to be able to distribute time bombed VMs, we also need a way to white-list them, if we want to use the VM for more than the allowed period. My company has done several projects where deployment has consisted of xcopy the VM file to the VM server, and the booting.

I spoke about it in the past, here