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."

bah

[chalkoutline]

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

What?

[Predflux]

What is this actually doing for fightung piracy? If someone codes an OS too look exactly like Windows, they won't be able to run Windows software?

It's useless.

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/ [syslog.org]

Re:Advantage Microsoft?

[mobiux]

I see this as nothing more than something to appease shareholders and discourage the low end pirate.
They are trying to make it look like they are trying to prevent the claimed "100 trillion" lost every year in software piracy.

It's not meant to help thier customers, it's meant to help themselves.

Diggin' the grave

[lanc]

s/the/their own/

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

[Speare]

Microsoft restricts Windows downloads to people that actually purchase their product!

Last time I was at the mall's food court, the various food merchants kept all of their napkins behind the counter. I guess napkin loss from non-customers was somehow a huge profit drain.

I bet a car sales lot would not take too kindly if you just walked in, grabbed a donut or two, a cup of coffee, and then walked out, either.

There are a few exceptions, though. A restaurant owner may put up a sign that says the "restrooms are for customers only," but most states have health laws that allow the general public to use most restaurant restrooms without purchase. Anti-virus products should likely have the same proviso.

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

[me at werk]

Oh no, if you run linux and WINE there is no possible way you didn't also purchase XP or a computer with XP preloaded! It's unpossible and inplausable as well as imcredible.

Why is this modded Insightful? Pretty much every computer you get these days is going to have the latest copy of Winders. These copies are legal and, technically, purchased. So why can't I, as a person who owns a legitimate copy of XP, use WINE to run windows programs in linux?

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 [winehq.org] project (and probably DOSBox [sourceforge.net]) 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.

Re:Dead software walking...

[mcleodnine]

quoth the shill

No they wouldn't. Linux people don't want to pay US$400 to use MS Office.

Yes they do [codeweavers.com]

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.

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:Not the first time.

[Kippesoep]

There was actually a sort-of legitimate reason for this. Larry Osterman posted about it on his blog, here [msdn.com], with a follow-up here [msdn.com]. It may have been implemented in a nasty way, but I doubt it was inspired solely by malevolence.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's worse - they block all that's "Not WIndows"

[rkaa]

A colleague of mine had gotten into trouble with his private laptop PC, an XP machine without network access. He uses it for games and music.

For music he had a player from Creative, which now gave error message: "Jet Engine Error: Music Library cannot be opened because the database is corrupt". I looked around and found that he needed to upgrade something called Jet and also to "MDAC 2.8".

The laptop had USB ports and I had a USB memory thingie (actually a camera with USB2 and a CF card). So I plugged it into the only PC we had there with a USB port - a Linux PC, and tried to download. No go. I was blocked because I couldn't verify it was a MS OS. Idiots..

I then tried to download from a Windows XP PC, thinking i could ftp the file over to the Linux machine. Again: No Go. I needed administrator access to install the verifying software that could verify that I was actually on a Windows PC. But I don't have admin on that PC. Onced upon a time we had to decide whether to remove admin access or network access to the Internet - it got too many worms. So it was decided to remove our admin access.

In the end I had to wait till after work and download from my private PC's XP installation, then copy to the CF card, then bring it back to work the next day, transfer the broken laptop and install the files and upgrades there. Turned out it didn't work after all :)

Anwyays: It could hade taken me 2 minutes to realize I was on the wrong track. It took 18 hours instead. That's absolutly horrible and extremely poor service from Microsoft.

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.

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

[chefren]

You mean the "I will sell you the soul of my firstborn child" EULA? EULAs don't count unless you accept the whole argeement. If parts of the agreements are legal bullshit, the the rest doesn't apply either.

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.

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

[B1]

They didn't use a very sophisticated method to determine if MS-DOS or DR-DOS was running. The fix was simple. Just lie. Perhaps the WINE folk can do the same.

It really depends what 'lie' means. In the case of DR DOS, my understanding is that they exploited some difference in how DR DOS and MS DOS implement an arcane and seldom-used system call. If they're pulling something like this with Wine, that's going to be a very tough arms race to keep up with. It's unwinnable too, depending on how far Microsoft wants to push it.

Microsoft has actually been on the losing end of this sort of thing before. Remember the great AOL/MSN Messenger interoperability battle a few years ago? Microsoft wanted to connect to AOL IM, but AOL kept blocking Microsoft. For every block AOL set up, Microsoft would figure out how to circumvent it...until finally AOL implmenented the 'nuclear option'.

Basically, AOL implemented a server-side sniffer that exploited a buffer overflow in their own IM client. MSN messenger was not bug compatible, so it didn't have this buffer overlow. They were faced with an unwelcome choice--either duplicate the same buffer overflow in MSN messenger, or concede defeat. Interoperability...or security?

Re:unsupported != deliberately crippled.

[monkeydo]

Unsupported also means that patches aren't tested on that configuration. That can lead to unexpected results which may leave your system in worse shape than before you installed the patch. It isn't unreasonable that MS wants to avoid this situation. You'll say that you accept that risk by running an unsupported system, but we all know that's bullshit and all the zealots would come running here bitching that M$ broke their Wine install.

Short anti-trust story from the past

[serutan]

In high school and college I had a part time business cutting notches in the ends of cardboard tubes. The company my dad worked for made paper for thermal copying machines (long time ago). To force customers to use only that brand of paper, the copy machine maker built little metal pegs onto the hubs that held the roll, and they wanted my dad's company to cut notches in the tubes that the paper was rolled on, which would engage the pegs. My dad's company didn't have an accurate way to cut these notches, so through some wangling he got me the job as a subcontractor. For a while I used a table saw with a homemade jig to align the tubes. Later I designed a motorized notch-cutting machine and had a retired machinist down the road build it for me.

Little did I know at the time that I was probably helping them violate anti-trust laws. But it sure did help put me through college.

The moral is that this type of practice isn't limited to the software business or to the "big boys".

Re:Mixed signals

[Reziac]

Unfortunately, that's my perception of the situation as well -- I use and like Windows, but by damn I am NOT going to let M$ install any bloody ActiveX or other "authentication" applet. It's a very short hop from "authentication before you can download" to "your software is too old so we are disabling it" or "we are now inspecting your machine on behalf of our partners".

If I need an update that bad, I'll find it somewhere else.

But it's also going to cripple the ability of legit user to patch critically vulnerable machines. Know how long it takes unpatched NT to get hacked? 30 seconds or less. I personally know sysadmins who had to borrow someone else's already patched machine (or find a suitably secure non-Windows box), download the needful patches, burn 'em to CD, then drag the CD over to the server and manually apply the patches -- because the fresh new server was being attacked before they could even get to M$'s site to FIND the damned patches.

So what happens if you're in the field, and you have available an already-secured linux box and an unpatched NT box that you need to download patches for? M$'s new requirement means that your unpatched NT box MUST be used to download patches; you can't sensibly use the linux box to fetch 'em.

This sort of shit is I yearn for the day when everything I need and do on Windows can be seamlessly handled by some other OS.