License Glossary
What Is a Volume Licensing?
Volume licensing is Microsoft's program for selling organisations hundreds or thousands of licenses under a single agreement, at unit prices far below individual retail. It is the main source of affordable genuine keys.
Organisations use MAK keys or KMS infrastructure depending on their needs. Keys from this program are real keys generated by Microsoft and validate on the activation server.
The large gap versus retail pricing is a distribution-model difference, not piracy: the same software selling at different prices through different channels is normal practice in the software industry.
What you should know
- MAK and KMS are the two activation methods of volume licensing
- Keys from this channel are genuine, Microsoft-generated keys
- The price gap comes from the distribution model, not piracy