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

They DON'T have a right

[erroneus]

That's the thing about being ruled as a monopoly. Just about anything they do to block competition, (including free software) might lead to legal action against them.

They are still a monopoly and have been found to have used their monopoly power for bad things. I think that's a significant difference between Microsoft doing this and just about anyone else. In this case, I don't believe they have a right to block downloads of anything they distribute in an otherwise free fashion.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I would like to see some sort of legal action taken against Microsoft for (again) singling out a competing product from operating with Windows. If this behavior continues unchecked, there will be lots more of this going on.

If I recall correctly, there was such an arms race when it came to the Samba project where I guess Microsoft just gave up trying to break Samba. I haven't heard anything about it lately... did they give up?

Genuine Disadvantage

[HangingChad]

The way I see it this is just MSFT's way of encouraging people to discover the functionality and capability of OpenOffice.

The more hoops they put in front of honest users to make them prove a negative, the more likely some of them will wise up and say, "F--- this!"

MSFT is their own worst enemy. I've never seen a big company work so hard at marginalizing their own customers. It sort of reminds me of the music industry, which apparently feels it has a devine right to continue reaping record profits while suing their customers. Forgetting that it's millions of individual CD and ticket buyers who got them to where they are.

To MSFT and the record industry you are nothing more than a revenue stream that needs to be kept in line.