It's not paranoia. It raises a intresting facet about how Microsoft has reacted in the past when it's cash cow runs on foreign architecture.
It was a though experiment and ment in no way to be accusatory in nature.
The fact of the matter is this.
I am willing to bet my Kawori Manabe poster on my wall that when WINE becomes a viable alternative to Microsoft's own API, they are going to try everything in thier power to keep thier applications from running on it. Everything from click through licences to outright FUD when you run the program.
Let me site a little example.
I used to work for an ISP a few years ago. We used SunOS for the core systems and placed Linux on the peripherals for webhosting. We had discoverd that if you attempted to use Microsoft's Frontpage extentions on a webserver that did not use them, you would get an error message in Fronpage telling you that you should *Switch you ISP to someone who deployed IIS*
Think about that; Microsoft is telling *our* customers to leave us because we didn't support thier proprietary extentions.
In the end we bought small IIS cluster to deal with that kind of garbarge.
I'm not paranoid, if anything just a little jaded, With Longhon delayed until 2007 at least, there as this amazing window of opportunity for WINE, and Linux for that matter, to fill the void.
Microsoft is going to try everything in it's power to detect and thwart the WINE environment with thier own software.
It would be trivial for MS to say, "Thank you for buying Microsift WOW! 2006, you are not authorized to copy the program from the CD-ROM to a WINE environment and doing so will constitute a violation of copyright, punishable by a maximum term of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Click here to exit the install program"
So now you are a criminal for running Microsoft software in a way Microsoft doesn't want you to.
I may be exaggerating a little, but I didn't think they would throw a Russan programmer into prision for telling how to defeat PDF encryption in the US either.
Just some foor for thought: The partial upshot is that there might be room for the ability to mask wine's footprint in the system for compatibility purposes.
Then again, MS could always to a checksum on some system DLLS just to make sure as well.
-Joshua
--- Raghavan Gurumurthy hath scribed...
We are not trying to limit the product in anyway on Linux - if any, we are trying to make sure that the end-user experience for our product when running on Linux is as painless and seamless as possible.
So, stop being so paranoid!
== Raghavan
-----Original Message----- From: Joshua Walker [mailto:halkun2002@yahoo.com] Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 5:13 PM To: wine-devel@winehq.com Subject: Re: How to determine if an application is running in Wine environment?
Hold on... Let's pretend that a particular software manufacturer decides that running thier software under wine is no in the best intrest of the company. Or better yet, decides that if the program isn't running under a true Microsoft windows It will you that running program XYZ under Wine is illigal (Due to click-wrap licence agreement). Can you safely remove that key so that "menie" programs like that don't know where they are.
Remeber DR-DOS and Win3.1?
--- Bill Medland billmedland@mercuryspeed.com wrote:
On June 9, 2004 10:07 am, Raghavan Gurumurthy
wrote:
BlankIf i want to do some special handling
inside
my Windows executable
when running in Wine environment, what is the
best
way to do this?
Thanks,
Unless things have changed, I think the normal
suggestion is to look
for the HKLM/Software/Wine registry key
Bill Medland mailto:billmedland@mercuryspeed.com http://webhome.idirect.com/~kbmed