Catching up with Wine

An anonymous reader writes "TransGaming's announcement of the availability of WineX 3.0 got a lot of pixel dust, but that wasn't the only recent news about WINE. The Microsoft monopoly also reached out to touch the project when Whil Hentzen, a leading proponent of Visual FoxPro (VFP) development on Linux, was contacted by an Microsoft manager and told it was a violation of the VFP EULA to run it on Linux." I guess thats one way to stop emulation. update Oh well, its a dupe. Whatever, it gives people something to complain about I guess ;)

Comments

Stop Emulation?

[Rinikusu]

But but but..
Wine
Is
Not an
Emulator

????

Life EULA

[lexcyber]

There is in the life EULA a section about not beeing a prick against your fellow humans. I think working at MS violates it.


Christ.... It is a sick sick world when you 1. pay many dollars for your software 2. after paying many dollars, not allowed to use it in new innovative ways.

Re:Life EULA

[arkanes]

Except, of course, that whole license crap is a load of horseshit. It's looks like a sale, it's treated as a sale, it's LISTED as a fucking sale in FCC documents, it's a sale. It's not a licenseing. There's no license. There's no signatures (EULA dialogs don't meet federal standards for electronic signatures by a long shot). There's no contract (there has to be consideration in contracts, and there's none in an EULA). If they want to license software, they need to do it right - and that means that every single person who buys software from you needs to be offered an agreement, agree to it, SIGN it (copies for both of you), and THEN, and only then, gets the software.

The commercial software industry is fucked up. It wants excemptions from responsibility that would be the envy of any other industry, while at the same time making it's own laws about the allowed use of it's products - with no chance for competition, because you're (supposedly) bound by the agreement AFTER you've paid! It's a travesty. At some point, there WILL be a shakedown and this sort of nonsense will either go away or be codified in real law - at which point we'll all be felons, and the bottom will drop out of the personal computer industry - because at that point we're essentially allowing anyone who sells software to write law, and you WILL start seeing things like EULAs that require you to give up your children.

Don't think that all the lawyers at MS don't know this, either. It's why they consistently shy away from cases involving EULAs, either winning them on other points or settling out of court. They KNOW that if push comes to shove, the concept of the EULA as a legally binding document can't stand.

Here's something to consider - there's not 1 single thing that makes it illegal for you to bypass an installer and just avoid an EULA entirely. Not even the DMCA - although you'd (probably) run afoul of it if you tried to distribute tools that did such a thing. Not that an installer is a copy protection device by any stretch of the imagination, but there you go.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Make the software capable of emulating VFP, but leave it up to the user to violate the EULA. Doesn't the user "agree" to the EULA anyway? The people involved in making the emulator have nothing to do with the end user breaking the EULA.

Wowza

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Is it me, or have more dupes been posted in the past 3 months than in the past 4 years? I'm not trolling, I'm just generally curious if the editors actually read their publication (if it can be considered a "publication" or site or whatever).

This story was big news, at least, I thought so. I thought it was insightful and telling (especially of MS monopolistic practices), and that it got a lot of (deserved) attention, even more so that it's been on /. But now, another dupe, and CmdrTaco is so oblivious to this it's really just sad.

It's okay if you don't agree. I can take the -1 Offtopic and -1 Troll if you wish. I can hear the karma sizzling...

Re:WINE is also not a properly licensed MS OS.

[sqlrob]

Just because you have paid for a license to use some software doesn't mean you can use it any way you like

No, they say you can't use it anyway you want. Whether or not that is legally enforceable is another question.

Re:EULA

[Carrot007]

> It's the reason why I just use VNC to get to my Windows machine

Isn't that also something microsoft has been moaning about, in that when vnc'ing to a windows os tht you need 2 windows licences, 1 for the "windows" machine and 1 for the machine that vnc is running on (ie for you linux box!) Dunno what happened there, i'm sure it was introduced (licence change) in xp and a win 2000 service pack.

Ho hum, licenses suck! In fact pretty much everything that tells you you can't do sucks, but that doesn;t mean letting you do what you want would work either, unfortunatly people want to make money, and restricting others is a good way to do that,

hmmmm:

Patent application:

For a method of creating revenue by restricting the rights of others.

MONEY!!!! ;-)

Re:WINE is also not a properly licensed MS OS.

[Catiline]

IANAL, but I do keep up with court cases; AFAIK there are very few valid EULAs (which appear solely online, BTW). Since the license is not presented to me until after the exchange of money for product, the doctrine of "First Sale" trumps many of the onerous "can't do that" clauses in EULAs. (See Softman v. Adobe.) When the fair use copying (to include space-shifting) is included, one can argue that an EULA is not required for use of software, despite the fact that copying or stated agreement-implying actions may take place. Since I bought the product to use it, my use of the product is not consent to an agreement (likewise, my exercise of fair use space shifting does not imply consent); therefore, since I have neither clearly stated an agreement to the license nor do I believe the EULA listed by boxed software (neither print nor digital) is valid, I do not feel bound by their conditions. (My actions are instead regulated by traditional copyright law, which still forbids redistrobution, modification, and multiple simultanious users.)

Even were the above false, VFP is produced by Microsoft. I would argue that this clause represents illegal (monopolistic) tying of the application product to Microsoft's operating systems.

Re:EULA

[arkanes]

Sigh. Time for some more slapping. One: The GPL is not an EULA. One more time: THE GPL IS NOT AN EULA.

It works under a different premise of law and performs a totally different purpose. It's been explained dozens of times and if you aren't clear on it now then you're either willfully ignorant or shouldn't be talking about things you haven't read.

MS does not support products under WINE. They never have. They likely never will. That's a given, and there's a huge difference between "not supporting a product" and "suing people who do unsupported things with your product". There seem to be alot of people here who can't understand that, either. If you aren't comfortable running important things under WINE, that's fine. Nobody will make you, especially not Microsoft. Although they've claimed that there aren't any undocumented APIs in Windows that're used for applications.

Here's another suprise - it IS perfectly okay to reverse engineer Windows. This is why MS hasn't sued Codeweavers or the WINE project. There's specific things you have to do to make sure you don't cross any legal lines, but as long as you do that you're fine. MS doesn't have to admit it - they don't have any say in the matter. WINE is a reverse engineering of the Win32 API from publically available documentation. Nothing wrong with that.

Next question: What makes you think that EULA's are "perfectly valid"? Just because they say they are?