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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 ;)
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1. pay many dollars for your software
That's how they rape consumers who don't understand the deal - you aren't really 'buying' the software, like you buy a box of soap - only a 'license' to use it in certain ways, like renting a car. The software is still the property of the Msft Corp. It's like XYZ Oil Company also leases cars, and part of the contract is that you will only use XYZ brand gasoline in it, and they can test for 'foreign' gas and charge you a fine if you put ABC gas in (even tho it works just as good or better). (It used to be, years ago, you could ONLY lease mainframes from IBM, you could not buy them outright).
Was reading something yesterday about how 'globalism' was supposed to INCREASE competition, but we are getting just the opposite effect - hi tech is enabling more 'protectionist' measures by companies (like the Lexmark 'chip in toner' deal). Software enables corporate protectionism and a whole 'nuther level of customer control, vendor lock in and removal of consumer choice.
Buy a sexy new toy, they gotcha!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
link
update Oh well, its a dupe. Whatever, it gives people something to complain about I guess ;)
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"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
Copying is not stealing. If you steal my car, I cannot drive it any more. If I copy a song, the original owner still can listen to it. Even if in both cases the victim sufferes financial losses, they are different - if I burn your house down, I'm still not a thief, even if you'd loose lots of money and other property because of it.
Not that "filesharing" would be legal, it's just that modern legal systems are advanced enough to feature more than one kind of crime.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Yes, I do realise that and I find it sad, but not all that surprising. Who wants to take all that time to read the licence and understand the issues? They want to watch a movie, or play Counter Strike. The MTV generation has an attention span of 3 seconds, and more than make up for it with an over abundence of apathy.[1]
I'll happilly tell you that back when Napster was new and exciting, I downloaded MP3's. When I got my Cable Modem, the first thing I did was to leech DivX;-)'s from Usenet. Then I realised that what I was doing was wrong, and as I was writing more and more GPL'd stuff, it was also hypocritical. I stopped doing all of that years ago.
I agree with you, though. It is easy to download warez, music and movies that you are not legally entitled to. Its a poor attitude, and it doesn't help that many people use the same argument as the grandparent poster, who attempts to justify theft with smoke and mirrors.
Sigh. Steal This Book indeed.
[1]: Now I feel like an old git! I'm 23, soon to be 24. Do I worry too much? I don't know...
This isn't about a EULA.
The problem is in order for this guy to get FoxPro to run under WINE he had to copy system DLLs from Windows.
It's a pure copyright violation.
Sigh. Time for some more slapping. One: The GPL is not an EULA. One more time: THE GPL IS NOT AN EULA.
They are different licenses (i.e., EULA, BSDL, GPL, LGPL), but they all use copyright law to enforce them. They are the same in that respect.