Re: Microsoft Blocking WINE Users From Downloads Site

From: Dan Palley (dan_at_trams.com)
Date: 02/17/05 

Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:25:10 -0800

"Mike Vance" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1c7eb6307573bd2a989689@forums.borland.com...
> This is one of those things that I think Delphi programmers should be
> aware of, especially because the majority of our Delphi 7 creations (and
> the Delphi 7 IDE itself) run perfectly fine under Linux's WINE (Windows
> Emulator). Microsoft is now finally recognizing that WINE is something
> of a threat. The Microsoft downloads center is now using an ActiveX
> control that aborts the download if WINE is detected. Here is the
> article:
>
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/17/1318212&tid=125&tid=
> 109&tid=106
>
 < snip>

This whole issue is about the change in WindowsUpdate where you can download
updates for MS Office. If you read the slashdot responses, you'll see that
the actual motivation for MS doing this is not clear, and that some people
rightly acknowledge that MS will only support Office running under Windows.
Note that they don't check for Wine when running Office, only when
retrieving updates from their WindowsUpdate web site as part of a check to
determine if the user has a valid copy of Windows. Now if they were to have
Office refuse to run under Wine, then that's another story (and possibly
still within their rights to do so).

You can still download Office updates manually and install them on systems
using Wine.

I think you're reading *way* too much into this issue.

Dan

Relevant Pages

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