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Microsoft Blocking Wine Users From Downloads Site
IamTheRealMike writes "In January, Microsoft announced a new anti-piracy initiative called
Genuine Advantage. From this summer onwards all users of Microsoft Downloads will be required to validate using either an ActiveX control or a standalone tool. Yesterday Ivan Leo Puoti, a Wine developer, discovered that the validation tool checks directly for Wine and bails out with a generic error when found. This is significant as it's not only the first time Microsoft has actively discriminated against users running their programs via Wine, but it's also the first time they've broken radio silence on the project."
Windows 3.1 deliberately refused to run under DR-DOS, the competitor to MS-DOS at the time. The deliberately vague error was caused by a block of obfuscated code--google for DR-DOS AARD.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Unless you can prove you have a license, they dont have to give you squat.
Having wine installed inst a license to use their DLL's. And in some
cases, even Microsoft applications you have *purchased*. Read your EULA's closely people.
Sure, its irritating as hell, and will make updating to run newer applicatinos a pain, but well within their legal rights.
Best solution is not to have to run wine if at all possible.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What if you have a valid purchased Office running on Wine and want to get updates for it?
I can understand Microsoft not supporting Windows downloads for Wine, but they should support Office downloads for Office, regardless of how it is run.
It's just the same idea of 'compatibility' for Microsoft - changes are intended to break competitor's products.
...to support his childish claims about OSS software having poor interoperability.
For me it's just another good reason to stay well clear from a software company with such business tactics.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Reminds me of this...
How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS
I've got to say that they DON'T have a right. I was a victim of their DR-DOS isn't compatible trick. I was forced to go buy Dos 6.0 and then it ATE MY DATA! I became rather negative towards this convicted monopolist when I found out they had done that on purpose!
Oh - did you notice that last sentence - CONVICTED MONOPOLIST. They have to play by a different set of rules.
If they are selling a package - say "Office" and someone wants to run that on another platform, then MS doesn't really have the right to restrict where it runs. They may imply they do through EULA's, etc. but this would like be easily proved as monopolist behavior - and oh yeah - they've been convicted of that already!
This behavior fits that model EXACTLY!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Realistically, Microsoft isn't going to put themselves out of business, with this stupid trick or any other. They'll be around, and be a damn big company, for a veeery long time.
What I do hope and halfway expect will happen is that they'll find themselves "in trouble" by Wall Street standards -- steadily declining profits turning into steady losses, with a corresponding implosion in stock proce -- and that this will force them to become a good company making a good product at a good price in order to gain their customers' trust and support. It's happened before; if someone had told me 20 years, hell, 10 years, ago that IBM in the 21st c. would be considered one of the good guys, I'd have laughed my ass off.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A lot of people are saying MS has the right to restrict downloads to people who own their software. I agree that they are liable to their customers, but some of their customers run wine.
I have a legal copy of Windows which is currently unused. I don't like dual booting. I don't like running under an x86 emulator. I like using Wine (or commercial variants of it) if I absolutely need to run win32 software. At the very least, my license to Windows should entitle me to downloads from MS--not whether or not I am using Windows to download them. They should at least give you the opportunity to enter in your product key. I'd still feel like this was obnoxious & be pissed at them, but at least people in a similar situation would be able to download programs from them.
I think what many object to is that they're being vague, at best, about what is the source of the "problem". If a message came up saying something like "Windows emulators are not supported for this operation", then there would be little room to complain. However, this is not the case, and many, myself included, suspect that MS is deliberately being vague about it, rather than having the courage (and smarts) to just be upfront about it.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Microsoft may have the right to refuse Windows upgrade downloads, but why do they refuse downloads of "productivity" apps like MS Office suite? As long as the software application is duly licensed, what right does Microsoft have to force the user to run it under "Genuine Windows" only?
If you can hack around this, more power to you, but MS is under no legal or ethical obligation to support your efforts.
Of course, there's a difference between not supporting your efforts, "accidentally" breaking your efforts, and actively trying to stop your efforts from working. This appears to be a pretty clear case of the third item in that list.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".
No, they are not. Your assessment is wrong.
If I purchase Office, run it under WINE and want to update it, I'm screwed -- yet I am a legit customer of Microsoft.
Considering you can't really update WINE thru WUS, WTF is the point?
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Better to ensure our users don't need anything from that website.
Well spoken. The same goes for microsoft as well: think about all that effort they put in to all that code over the years to break other software and twist standards and spy on you and keep you from doing anything they don't want... and then think of how much better windows could possibly be if they had spent all that time making the product more functional and fixing all the damned bugs.
Boy can we learn from this... oh wait, we allready have.
I sure as hell don't use windows or windows based apps so news like this is just funny to me when I look at the triple digit uptime on most of the 5000 web servers we run from my own gentoo workstation.
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Except that MS already has a history of not allowing their programs to run on other operating systems and throwing generic error messages. You remember DR-DOS/win3.1 right?
Wasn't that judged illegal?
Now if they're doing the same thing with office or their games, and they're refusing to run on wine...
It's not like their restricting you from running Windows on a competing platform.
What does this have to do with anything, and who said this is what was happening?
I read the article, and unless I missed something, this is NOT the complaint.
I don't use WINE to run Windows(c) OS, I run it to run some (work required) Office apps and some games.
The Office apps were purchased and presumably have rights to be updated the same as any other user of Office apps. Same with the games.
But Microsoft is saying that, because I am using a valid purchased version of their software on an OS other than Windows (by using WINE) they will not allow updates from their servers.
This is the mirror image of their antitrust loss - they were accused of using their market possition (monopoly) in the OS to maintain and grow their market position in other markets, while here they are using their market possition in the other areas to maintain their possition in the OS market.
You say you were a victim of the DR-DOS 'trick', where a competiting product was specifically checked for and then bogus 'error' messages were given, or the applications just didn't work as expected - not because of a problem with DR-DOS, but because the app was PROGRAMMED to work differently when used with DR-DOS. Like is happening here?
You say you worked at WordPerfect. Isn't that the company that worked with Microsoft to be compatable and competitive, then Microsoft changed the APIs and didn't publish them to competitors of their Office (specifically Word(c)) and royally screwed WordPerfect over?
Novell - didn't I hear their networking applications were deliberately 'broken' by Microsoft so that Microsofts' market share of networking would not be threatened? Like here?
They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".
No, they are just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a Microsoft Windows OS customer first (even if you are a valid Microsoft Office customer)." Very different than what you posted.
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
No, they don't. As a CONVICTED MONOPOLIST they are explicitly prohibited from forcing owners of one of their products (such as Office) to use another of their products (specifically Windows).
This may be proof that Bill Gates is a liar...
From interview:
JENNINGS: Everybody I talked to seems to, particularly if they are young, seems to think that open sourcing is important and that among the reasons it is important is that it enables them to run more secure systems. Is that true from your point of view?
GATES: Actually no, but that is the kind of competition that we have. Is that they will innovate in that space, we will innovate in our space. And in fact, we do a lot of work to make sure that these things can inter-operate so that a company can have a mix of Microsoft products, Unix products, Mainframe products, and then each time they do a project they can look and say - is the Microsoft solution best? Is the other solution best? And so there will just be a lot of choices there, no one approach is going to replace the other. (emphasis above added)
Now compare the above with this:
" If you visit the download center with IE you get an activex control, but if you try with Firefox, you'll have to download a little program, that returns a code you have to copy into the download page, to get access to the download you selected. By quickly looking at the program, I noticed it looks for a registry key, this key is... SOFTWARE\Wine\Wine\Config the wine configuration key. the Windows Genuine Advantage program press release says that in the second half of 2005, all users connecting to the Microsoft download center or to windows update will have to validate their copy of windows. Interestingly if you run the validation program on wine, and the version of windows you're emulating is prior to 2000 or is windows server 20003, you get a message saying a validation code couldn't be found, because of technical difficulties or because you're running an unsupported operating system."
"Unsupported configuration" merely means "I'm not going out of my way to make it work for this configuration. If it happens to work, it works, if it happens to fail, it fails. Too bad. I'm not going out of my way to do anything about it." But what Microsoft actually does when they misuse the word "unsupported" is to deliberately cripple the configuration, adding EXTRA code to look for that configuration and deliberately fail on it. (As they did in this case) They go out of their way to ensure it fails.
That means "unsupported" is not telling the whole story. It's deliberate deception.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.