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."

Comments

bah

[chalkoutline]

Didn't they do something like this with the Trillian protocol on MSN Messenger? They hate third parties.

Re:bah

[Spyffe]

I don't see that this is necessarily discrimination. I would think that if they wanted to fail on Wine, and they had a way of knowing it was Wine (they do, the registry key) it would be trivial to fail in all cases.

However, they don't. They only fail when Wine is emulating earlier versions of Windows, which might be a problem with Wine's emulation. Barring further evidence, I would look at the Wine check as a means to count Wine users, not to block them.

Re:bah

[squiggleslash]

Yeah, but you had to pay for Windows 3.1. So it was a simple anti-competition move.

In this case, Microsoft is denying giving Wine users the stuff Windows users have paid for (unless they download it via Windows.) I think that's different. It's a simple case of "You don't get a free gift unless you're our customer."

Re:bah

[Robert The Coward]

Try again. 1st Yea a case could be made for windows media player and a few things like that but what about office. I bought office 2000. Outlook 2000 had a bug in that if you get more 2 Gig worth of email it will crash and no alow any changes including deleting old messages. So you have to get some utils from were microsoft.com to fix they file and to provent it in the 1st place again you have to go to microsoft.com. So by proventing wine from working they are proventing my from getting import updates and bug fixes for a program I bought and paid for. So much for the free gift idea.

Advantage Microsoft?

[PaisteUser]

My question is who gains from using the "Genuine Advantage"? I don't see how that would change my Windows expirience on a day-to-day basis.

yet another lawsuit waiting

[confusion]

Sadly, the only people that are gaining anything, even when MS loses anti-trust cases, are the lawyers. I don't see this one getting that far, though.

I'm guessing that the only real downloads a Wine user would be making are updates for Office, correct? I'm drawing a blank on what else it could be. I haven't had the time to read my MS office EULA yet, but I'm guessing it doesn't specifically call out that it has to be run on Windows. That doesn't mean that MS has to provide you support if you're not. This is an automated incarnation of what has happened for years:
me> I need support
support> You're computer case isn't blue, is it?
me> yes, it is, thanks for asking
support> We don't support our software on computers with blue cases. Thanks for calling.
me> argh!
I think we've all been in that boat at one point or another.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you!

[mcleodnine]

I run Microsoft Office under CodeWeavers' Crossover Office, both of which are licensed (read: I paid for it), so yes, I find the news disturbing.

It also appears to be a very shortsighted move on their part while under a worldwide antitrust microscope.

Re:To be fair though...

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, the Office EULA specifically prohibits you from running it under anything but a MS Operating System

IANAL, but that sounds to me like leveraging a de facto monopoly on Office Suites to maintain their de facto monopoly on desktop operating systems...

It Had to Happen Eventually

[eno2001]

I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. When I first installed Windows Media Player 6 a few years back, I was surprised to see that it was actually downloading codecs from MS. I figured they would have blocked non MS clients from doing this way back then. I can't say this comes as a shock.

On the flipside, I wonder if this means that WINE has moved from the part where MS ignored them and will begin laughing at them. :) I also wonder how much code from the WINE project (and probably DOSBox) made it into Windows XP for backwards compatibility? ;P I think DOSBox does a much better job of running old DOS games on XP than XP does.

You have to figure that MS bought Connectix for their virtualization technology so that they could actually dump backwards compatibility from the core OS and just use limited virtualization for better backward compatibility. At the same time by dumping all that cruft from the core OS, they can make the OS something more advanced. XP was a pretty big leap from Win2K in that direction (dropping support for CPUs below P II for example). I would have to guess that Longhorn is going to be an even bigger jump which is why it's taking so long.

IE + Wine

[morcego]

Just tested downloading using Internet Explorer running under Wine.
Installed the ActiveX component, and downloaded just fine.

Tried with the AntiSpyware product of theirs.

Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you!

[illumin8]

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!

Hell, I was a victim of their DR-DOS trick too. I was even more of a victim since I used to work at WordPerfect, and then Novell after that. But this is a totally different scenario. It's not like their restricting you from running Windows on a competing platform. They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".

At best it's an inconvenience for me

[omega9]

For the past four years I've been managing a couple of Windows 2K Server farms from a Linux workstation. The simple combination of rdesktop and a WM that has virtual desktops makes for a pretty kickass KVM-a-like with a full workstaton behind it.

So just yesterday I'm at Microsoft's site grabbing a copy of Sonar, a file replication monitoring tool, and it wants to immediately verify my copy of Windows. But I'm grabbing the file from my workstation because the machines it will be applied to don't have direct access to the internet. Luckily for now, I can choose to skip the verification step, but eventually I know I won't be able to.

I would imagine that my scenario is far from unique. It certainly isn't deceptive in any way, but I've got the feeling that it won't be an option for me in the near future.

Pay close attention Mono users!

[puppetluva]

This is a sign of things to come for Mono.

Sure, I know that you can do without Genuine Microsoft binaries for much of Mono, but being blocked from having updates sure hurts the compatibility argument to Mono. (ie. updates to the .Net project can easily be withheld and apps written on the MS platform can be forced to link against them)

I know that many Wine libraries are needed for the Forms libaries and this will be a blow for dll updates and changes there.

If Microsoft tries to enforce their patent protections on top of this kind of thing, it will be game-over for the new Gnome development on Mono. Score: Microsoft 1, Linux Desktop -1

Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you!

[DrNibbler]

How many people are using Linux and a legitimate copy of Office?

As long as the answer is > 0 does it matter? This is the same logic that supports a MS tax on new machine purchaes. From a business standpoint is this anyway to treat a customer?

Why use Microsoft Office at all when you have accepted the concept of Open Source Software? OpenOffice does the same stuff and performs significantly better under Linux than anything running under Wine or Crossover.

For a number of reasons my work box is a dual booted box running XP and Linux. In order to use email here I must use Outlook (corporate rules). To avoid playing the reboot to get my mail game I'm running MS-Office under Crossover. The copy is legally licensed as part of our site license (we even counted it as a seperate install from the one that runs on the windows partition). Please tell me why I should not be allowed to update Office.