SamuraiCatJB
02-28-2005, 12:07 PM
everyone is acting surprised, and there is lots of talks about how this is the first time windows has done such a thing....
Microsoft Looks for Wine
News
Slashdot covered a story that first appeared on wine-devel and WineHQ about Microsoft checking for Wine. The Slashdot story read:
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."
Well, that's a pretty good summary of the news. The actual thread is covered in the next section, so we'll save the details for that. Surprisingly, most of the armchair lawyers stayed at home and didn't ponder some of the ramifications.
As far as Wine is concerned, Microsoft certainly chose an interesting time to try this out. In the past, several free downloads such as DCOM and MSI were necessary to get a lot of apps to install and run. However, work is progressing at a phenomenal rate in both of those areas. By the time this tool is required, Wine's own builtin versions will be more than adequate.
It sure is nice to be noticed.
Wine should be cautious... this was how Microsoft ran QEMM out of business and DesqViewX/DrDos and others many, many years ago. Set your way-back machines for the early 1990's. Dos 6.2 is still the standard, extended memory is mastered by QEMM and microsoft has their own memory manager that is struggling, even though it is part of DOS, and windows 95 isn't even a pipedream yet. MIcrosoft introduces Windows 3.1 to run on top of DOS 6.2+, and low and behold it crashes on machines with QEMM installed.
Enter the lawyers, the engineers (not in that order). Microsoft actually did an ID check on the memory manager as part of Windows 3.1 (and 3.11 for workgroups), and if it did not find its own extended memory manager in operation, it forced a crash. It was a 2 year battle, and Microsoft actually lost, they never settled out of court, but it was too late. QEMM won a settlement post-mortem, Microsoft won in that they received no punishment for killing the company only for damaging sales at the time of litigation start and discovery, and forced to remove the code that checked for a competing product.
Does this mean that Windows is going to make an all out effort like this again? to kill Linux? Time will tell... time will tell...
Microsoft Looks for Wine
News
Slashdot covered a story that first appeared on wine-devel and WineHQ about Microsoft checking for Wine. The Slashdot story read:
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."
Well, that's a pretty good summary of the news. The actual thread is covered in the next section, so we'll save the details for that. Surprisingly, most of the armchair lawyers stayed at home and didn't ponder some of the ramifications.
As far as Wine is concerned, Microsoft certainly chose an interesting time to try this out. In the past, several free downloads such as DCOM and MSI were necessary to get a lot of apps to install and run. However, work is progressing at a phenomenal rate in both of those areas. By the time this tool is required, Wine's own builtin versions will be more than adequate.
It sure is nice to be noticed.
Wine should be cautious... this was how Microsoft ran QEMM out of business and DesqViewX/DrDos and others many, many years ago. Set your way-back machines for the early 1990's. Dos 6.2 is still the standard, extended memory is mastered by QEMM and microsoft has their own memory manager that is struggling, even though it is part of DOS, and windows 95 isn't even a pipedream yet. MIcrosoft introduces Windows 3.1 to run on top of DOS 6.2+, and low and behold it crashes on machines with QEMM installed.
Enter the lawyers, the engineers (not in that order). Microsoft actually did an ID check on the memory manager as part of Windows 3.1 (and 3.11 for workgroups), and if it did not find its own extended memory manager in operation, it forced a crash. It was a 2 year battle, and Microsoft actually lost, they never settled out of court, but it was too late. QEMM won a settlement post-mortem, Microsoft won in that they received no punishment for killing the company only for damaging sales at the time of litigation start and discovery, and forced to remove the code that checked for a competing product.
Does this mean that Windows is going to make an all out effort like this again? to kill Linux? Time will tell... time will tell...