05.10.08
Quick Mention: What on Earth is Microsoft Doing to Fine Wine?
A colleague of mine at the office has just told me that Microsoft is scanning the Registry files to ensure there’s no Wine in there. Wine has just reached RC of the highly-anticipated version 1.0 [*], but the issue was brought up an hour ago for other reasons. “They check the configuration key for Wine and prevent it from updating,” he says. I believe he’s referring to an installation of Free software on top of something like Cygwin because I found the notion of running Wine under a ’sub-environment’ in Windows a little unfamiliar. We use different terminology and and he speaks of his brother’s experience, which he was able to verify after some googling. “If you have it installed on your computer, they block the configuration key,” he adds.
We’ve covered before some of the impact of the software patent deals on Wine (last discussed here, with this follow-up confirming some things). it’s something to explore a little later if time permits. The Billwatch Archive has many analogous stories from one decade ago (c/f Java sabotage, Corel, OLE “garbage”). █
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[*] Wine 1.0 Releases Candidate Released
This is release 1.0-rc1 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.
This is the first release candidate for Wine 1.0. Please give it a good testing to help us make 1.0 as good as possible.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.