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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 ;)
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.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
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.
Do you like Japanese imports?
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?