Microsoft Demands Removal Of Longhorn Images

bonch writes "After the previously reported release of the Longhorn beta at this year's WinHEC, Neowin and other Windows sites are reporting that Microsoft is going around sending legal letters demanding removal of Longhorn Build 5048 screenshots. Paul Thurrott discusses it on his site, stating that Microsoft never told anyone beforehand not to post screenshots of the publicly available beta, and links to the new galleries he has up now. 'Enjoy it while it lasts.'"

Comments

Re:Microsoft is pointing fingers wrong way...

[panaceaa]

Microsoft only has $34B in cash now. They've spent 25 billion over the past few years on buying back their own stock and giving a bunch back to investors in a one-time dividend.

EULA again

[ajaf]

"Apparently, there is a condition in the EULA preventing people from posting screenshots. Nobody saw anything like that."

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=46188

Re:What is Microsoft trying to hide?

[cpeterso]

This Longhorn beta might looks a lot like Windows XP, but Microsoft is probably saving the cool GUI changes until the last beta or RTM milestone. Betas of earlier Windows version did the same thing.

Re:Are you sure?

[Phisbut]

All this almost makes me want to switch to a Mac, if only they were not so bloody expensive. I just can't get myself to pay $1500+ for a computer. I've never spent more than $500 on any machine I have ever owned, with the exception of my laptop.

Welcome to the world of the MacMini.

Re:First Post People Suck

[Gubbe]

Looks like it was #1 that was the correct answer:

"1:07pm
OK, Microsoft has provided its explanation. What it boils down to is that there may be certain technologies in the Longhorn Developer Preview build for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications, and the confidentiality provisions protect or mitigate the company's filing rights. One of the focus areas of IP protection has been user interface, hence Microsoft cannot permit screenshots of the UI. I was told that Microsoft had left its Media Center user interface unprotected, and that UI has been stolen and replicated in numerous other places. They don't want that to happen to Longhorn."

From the Thurrott link.

Nice Selective Copying

[h2d2]

Nope, I'm not talking about MS copying Apple... I'm talking about the submitter, who carefully left out this important point from Thurrott's post:

"Apparently, there is a condition in the EULA preventing people from posting screenshots."

You may continue MS bashing now...

Re:Microsoft is pointing fingers wrong way...

[dioscaido]

Build 5048 is not a beta. It is a stripped down version of Longhorn that contains enough of the system framework for hardware developers to being writing their drivers. This is WinHEC, remember? Beta is planned for August. The features I work on, and most of the features I've seen in other group's demos, were not merged into this build.

Re:I bet

[ryanw]

Longhorn is a far more important and comprehensive upgrade than Tiger

All the features you raved that Longhorn WILL HAVE, TIGER HAS. If you're all stoked on longhorn, then you'd be flippin out about Tiger. With tiger you get to stare at your pixel perfect rendered desktop while using features needed to maintain sanity in this 'paperless environment'.

Not so much "gone" as "still there."

[chefmonkey]

Or, more accurately, simply commented out of the HTML.

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And here is some random text to attempt to satisfy Slashdot's inane content filters. Apparently, it has to be quite a bit of text. I don't know what the average line length is that it requires, but it looks like it's unreasonably high.