Microsoft provides legal Vagrant box for Windows Server 2012 R2 Data Center

I don't really understand the how and why of this, I guess. I have two "issues" with it:

1) That's a large, 8.3GB download - how are they making money if "anyone, anywhere, even if they aren't logged in" can download it? I could imagine their bandwidth bills would be big from regular users downloading the image but their bandwidth will be MASSIVE with bots/etc downloading.

2) 90 days, until June 28th

It's a VM that is hard coded to die within the next 90 days. Is the plan to then have them rebuild/re-host a new version on June 29? Then I'll download it, and use it for 90 days? What value is this for people who reach this page on June 14, for example?

This has to be MSFT licensing driven. "We don't really want to support this sort of thing but we do want people to think we do. What we'll do is release time-bombed versions and then hope folks will hate it so much that they decide to spin up an instance on Azure."

I just don't understand how this fits into Microsoft's "Let's move everyone who wants to 'test' our software to the cloud" movement that they've been on about for the past year or so (with the cancelling of Technet, etc).

Setting up automated testing for a Windows application is an excruciating manual process of installing the OS in a VM and periodically manually installing updates, multiplied by 15+ OS flavors. It's a big waste of time that Microsoft could solve by simply releasing images periodically. I hope this release is the first step in that direction.