Will Boot Camp drive Leopard sales

Gregg Keizer over on Computerworld posted an warning for Boot Camp users:

The news was no secret: Apple had spelled it out on the Boot Camp download page and in the EULA (end user license agreement) included with the beta and posted on the Apple site. "The term of this License...will terminate automatically without notice from Apple upon the next commercial release of the Apple Software, or December 31, 2007, whichever occurs first," the EULA states.

According to Apple, Windows partitions already installed on Macs using Boot Camp will continue to work, but the Assistant software, which sets up and manages those partitions, will not once the license expires. "And Apple will not offer driver updates to beta users," said company spokesman Anuj Nayar in an e-mail today.

Boot Camp has been one of Apple's killer apps and has received a lot of publicity, and it seems that Apple predicted this and added a time-bomb to the software in order to make sure that users who were hooked on it upgraded to Leopard.

Now this raises an interesting question - is Boot Camp worth upgrading to Leopard for? I used Boot Camp for a few weeks earlier this year and was highly impressed by it, certainly impressed enough to consider upgrading if I was using Max OS X. If you want the ultimate, go for Parallels, which is by far the best virtualization tool out there and the product that I really wished VMware Workstation was, but if you don't want to spend the cash and just want a simple dual boot setup, Boot Camp is very nice indeed. I'm guessing that I'm not along in thinking like this and that a lot of people will be willing to fork over cash to Apple just for the privilege of running Boot Camp.

Thoughts?