Microsoft Forces Shutdown of Autopatcher

kaufmanmoore writes "Posts on Neowin and Autopatcher's site announce Microsoft has forced the closure of the Autopatcher download section. Details are scarce as to the exact reason for the take down after over 4 years of availability, but an official from Microsoft legal says that it has nothing to do with Windows Genuine Advantage. Goodbye to another useful tool that helped sysadmins apply Microsoft's numerous patches."

Comments

Terrific. How long before they break even that?

[Erris]

offline update is terrific; its basically a script that wgets the patches directly from Microsoft,

The geinous of M$ can not be understated. Rather than let people share the burden of distributing their "patches" (efficiently)they will make everyone go to them. We have just seen how well they do at an easier task.

It won't be long before they only allow "authenticated" clients to download.

The contrast between this and the free software world could not be greater. Every gnu/linux distro has been easy to keep up today for the last ten years and there are verified mirrors everywhere. When you download a package from a mirror, you can md5 sum check it against the original source and most package managers do this automatically. M$ on the other hand, won't even let you distribute what they consider "free". Be wary when someone from M$ advocates BSD, love of your freedom is not the reason for their advice.