Microsoft Blocking Wine Users From Downloads Site 895
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."
Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's all get together on Slashdot and WINE about it...
To be fair though... (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't like there is anything particularly ugly about what Microsoft is doing. I mean, they really don't have an obligation to provide downloads of wine users, who are using a (somewhat) compatible competing system rather than theirs.
I use wine to run some things, and I have not paid a dime to microsoft, so I don't exactly expect them to provide me with any services.
Not the first time. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's working as designed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't we be complaining if it *wasn't* working right?
Idiotic Policy (Score:2, Insightful)
Now they're blocking competing software applications from downloading them as well? They're fortunate that there isn't an outcry to make them pay to ship billions of CDs to registered users of Windows. They should be thrilled that people are willing to take the time to download their patches, regardless of whether they can prove their licensing or what other software they run.
This is just incredibly idiotic. Secure and spyware-free Windows boxes mean less spam and other nuisances for everyone on the Internet. I thought Microsoft has supposedly declared war on such things - I guess not.
While I disagree with the action (Score:2, Insightful)
Will Wine fight back? Hmm...
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:1, Insightful)
Its Microsofts Right (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:To be fair though... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand Microsoft not supporting Windows downloads for Wine, but they should support Office downloads for Office, regardless of how it is run.
DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run. (Score:5, Insightful)
another anti-trust violation by MS (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah, longer than that (Score:2, Insightful)
To little to late (Score:2, Insightful)
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pissed? (Score:1, Insightful)
This was the only way for Bill... (Score:5, Insightful)
For me it's just another good reason to stay well clear from a software company with such business tactics.
Dr. DOS (Score:5, Insightful)
How MS played the incompatibility card against DR-DOS [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Dead software walking... (Score:3, Insightful)
If only MS had released a suite for Linux about 2 years ago, they'd be sailing pretty by now.
No they wouldn't. Linux people don't want to pay US$400 to use MS Office.
Bad because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
To my knowledge WINE is an emulator for windows, so that windows programs may be run without purchasing windows. It is NOT some sort of cracked version of windows. We all know Microsoft hates losing the bling bling, but few linux users are likely to front said bling on top of the cost for the windows program. It comes out to probably 100-2000$ depending on the program, and the cost of Windows Xp Home(which i use because it only costs 100 bucks for easy typing).
That said, WINE shouldn't be reliant on Microsoft for updates. The WINE community should fix it(if it is a bug), no handout thank-you. And Microsoft is not responsible for WINE, they should just plainly state "WINE is not a supported Microsoft product and therefore does not get updates"
Putting this under some cover is bad, and shows microsofts(already known) business tendancies, to be sneaky and mean.
Sneaky-snake!
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
But... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get the point of doing that.
Re:Dead software walking... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:2, Insightful)
Check the product specs on the side of the software box you purchased. I'll wager "WINE atop Linux" is not included as a supported OS. If you can hack around this, more power to you, but MS is under no legal or ethical obligation to support your efforts.
If I get the latest SUSE distro to run on my toaster oven, but have trouble getting the 5.1 audio to play out through the speakers in the dishwasher, no maintenance agreement in the world is going to get them to return my call...
What about Licensed copies of Office? (Score:1, Insightful)
What if I DO have a copy of their software? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It is, if obfuscation is part of the design (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, it's working as designed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Legal Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if it doesnt, expect a crushing lawsuit that will put them out of business.
Re:Pissed? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I bought MS Office, and MS is putting out patches for it, I have the right to get those patches. If MS refuses to service me, then they can refund my money.
Why should I have to jump through hoops just because Microsoft says so? I am the customer, dammit.
Re:To be fair though... (Score:2, Insightful)
i'm pretty sure there's a clause in the EULA that prohibits you from running Office on anything other than Windows or "supported" emulators, like Virtual PC. in such a case, you can challenge the validity of EULA, but you are using it "illegally" and thus are not owed support, even if you had paid for it.
Mac OS X has a similar clause, limiting its installation to apple branded hardware.
Re:Bad because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So, it's working as designed.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bad because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Mixed signals (Score:4, Insightful)
They've realised that other crackers (not employed by MS) were using it too much, so they are now making it so only they can take over your machine with ActiveX. Makes perfect sense to me.
BTW, I'm being totally serious.
Active X and Security .... (Score:4, Insightful)
My biggest problem with the way that Microsoft does a lot of things is this damned Active X stuff. In order to secure your system, everyone says turn this crap off because it's a huge gaping hole.
In order to do anything with Microsoft's site, you need to set your security settings to abysmal in order to use the damned site. I'm sure a more Windows-savvy user can set it up to have these settings off and still use this stuff.
I find it annoying and most people probably end up leaving themselves with insecure settings so they can get their security updates.
Silly.
Re:Pay close attention Mono users! (Score:1, Insightful)
What? What do you mean "updates to the
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Its Microsofts Right (Score:3, Insightful)
As to why it sometimes doesn't work if you have Wine installed on a Windows machine, that I can't say (but why would you have it installed anyway?). However, the fact that it works if Wine's set to emulate XP suggests Wine might be fooling the validator as to the Windows version, rather that the validator refusing to work merely because Wine is on the machine.
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to me that if such terms are in a license, then you don't really NEED any trial to speak of to get a conviction for antitrust. All you need is Exhibit A, the license that *ties* the two products together.
Of course the product that benefits from the tying (the OS) is itself a monopoly. But given that Office is also effectively a monopoly, though it hasn't been declared so in court, doesn't this qualify as a "monopoly maintenance" device, which is also illegal under antitrust.
I believe Microsoft is justified in not giving support for its products running in an unsupported environment. But to restrict patch availability to a product based on the OS running underneath is kind of like a car parts store requiring your Ford registration before you can buy Ford accessories.
Re:bah (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wait a sec... (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to run Windows to be an MS customer... Our corporate Macs all run Office 2004, but not windows. We're considered customers, though.... And I hope this article is merely incomplete, since we don't run Windows and as far as I know ActiveX controls are dodgy at best on IE for the Mac... If we can't patch our machines, we'll likely be in the market for other office suites.
A more likely explanation is that MS offers a (sort of) competing product: Virtual PC. While its true VPC has recently been made useless by intentionally limiting you to only running virtual Windows computers, it is still in the same market. If MS doesn't get "bad PRed" out of doing this, look for VMWare to be similarly targetted in the future.
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Pissed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Otherwise the software company would be misleading customers about a very important aspect of their product.
Re:While I disagree with the action (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its Microsofts Right (Score:1, Insightful)
Here's a new one: fuck off.
Ignore the EULA's, they mean nothing. If you bought a program, you can run it under wine, vmware, or any other fucking thing that YOU choose.
Don't buy into the hype of "oh, you only bought a license, not the product itself."
Right.
Fuck off.
Re:bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dead software walking... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bah (Score:1, Insightful)
And I bet that same list was on the outside of the box when you bought it. So if you are running Office 2000 on Wine, you knew from the very beginning that it was an unsupported configuration.
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:3, Insightful)
That part is clear. If you're a paying customer who bought Office they should supply bugfixes and updates regardless of your OS.
What gets unclear is OS updates, and specifically in the case of Wine, Internet Explorer updates (remember IE is a part of the OS). Now take a look at the EULA for the KB834707 update for IE6.0sp1 (Microsoft's caps):
NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A VALIDLY LICENSED COPY OF ANY VERSION OR EDITION OF MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95, WINDOWS 98, WINDOWS NT 4.0 WINDOWS 2000 OPERATING SYSTEM OR ANY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM THAT IS A SUCCESSOR TO ANY OF THOSE OPERATING SYSTEMS (each an "OS Product"), YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO INSTALL, COPY OR OTHERWISE USE THE OS COMPONENTS AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THIS SUPPLEMENTAL EULA.
This is actually good for Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, with MS restricting updates to only legitimate copies, I would venture to guess that this will cause a decrease in the number of machines running Windows. Which means that there will be less machines running Longhorn than there are machines running XP, and hence more machines running alternate OSes. This is somewhat analogous to Apple restricting their software to their own hardware, and suffering as a result (in the PC business, of course).
Just a thought.
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, the whole analogy is a bit strained. I'm not sure that anyone who can't update their MS Office is going to catch on fire.
Re:bah (Score:5, Insightful)
From interview: [go.com]
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: [winehq.com]
" 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."
good advertising for Wine (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft cannot compete... (Score:3, Insightful)
The message: Microsoft cannot compete unless they have an unfair advantage.
Just like HP. Without the crazy, temporary, situation of being able to sell ink, that is mostly cheap solvent, for thousands of dollars more than the cost of the raw material, HP would be much smaller and poorer.
These people are not real business people. They survive only by being adversarial toward the world.
Did anyone RTFP? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I run the validation program on my genuine Win2k system, I get the message saying a validation code couldn't be found because of technical difficulties or because I'm running an unsupported operating system. When using IE and thus the ActiveX control there is no problem and my Windows is recognized as genuine. Looks to me the standalone validation program is seriously broken....
"You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO."
But please flame me if I'm wrong;)
unsupported != deliberately crippled. (Score:5, Insightful)
That means "unsupported" is not telling the whole story. It's deliberate deception.
This is silly (Score:1, Insightful)
Now where the true stupidity sets in is setting this information as 'news'. Note that nowhere in the article does it say MS is preventing people from directly downloading the update files themselves- MS is only preventing people from using the automatic updater. So don't be lazy- when there is a new update, go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and look up the files you need. WOW! Problem solved...
blocking updates (Score:1, Insightful)
I'll guess that the next round of spyware will likely also include a thing to make all Windows boxes "wine compliant".
I'm sure that there are a bunch of malware writers thinking "thanks billg"! (Well, I guess they already were, but now they have another reason.)
Re:Bad, bad Microsoft.... no cookie for you! (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO just because one uses software in an "unsupported" manner, does not mean they should be actively denied updates. If the update fails on its own because its being used in an unsupported manner, fine. But to actively sabototage an update just because you don't support the way its being used is simply wrong in my book.
So now we know why Jeff Goldbloom's character used a Mac to save the world in Independence Day. If he used Windows in a life-or-death situation (an unsupported use according to the EULA) he would have been denied the updates to prevent the aliens from infecting his computer the next time around.
What if I have a Win license *and* use Wine? (Score:3, Insightful)
The EULA says I must have a Windows license, but it doesn't say I must use that licensed copy of Windows to run the software.