In the "old days", a unique PID used to be printed on every licensing
sticker that you purchase, so if you purchased 100 licenses, you'd
have 100 different PIDs that you could use. The licensing agreement
did not require you to build your image 100 times, using one PID for
each licensed XPe image that you wish to deploy. They simply
instructed to randomly select one of the 100 available PIDs, use that
to license the build of the master image, and then you can clone the
master image to however many devices that you have licensing stickers
for. After all, it would be ridiculuos to have to rebuild the image
just to use every PID that was issued.
Now they no longer print PIDs on the stickers and instead include with
the batch of stickers a flyer that has a PID printed on it. However,
the same general rule applies. Let's say that you buy your first 10
XPe licenses. You will be sent an envelope with 10 stickers and at
least one PID. So you build your image using one of the PIDs that were
supplied to you and clone the image to the 10 devices for which you
have purchased XPe licenses for. Now let's say that you needed to buy
an additional 100 licenses; you would get 100 more licensing stickers
and at least one more PID with that batch. You don't have to rebuild
your image using a new PID from the new batch of licensing stickers.
You can simply continue to clone the original master image to however
many devices for which you have stickers for. From Microsoft's point
of view, you are associated with every PID that is issued to you as a
customer, so it doesn't really matter which PID you use.
One of the important parts of the license agreement is that you place
the stickers where they are "visible" on each device that has an XPe
image deployed to it.
