How to determine if an application is running in Wine environ ment?

[Joshua Walker]

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 at yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 5:13 PM
> To: wine-devel at 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 at 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 at mercuryspeed.com
> > http://webhome.idirect.com/~kbmed
> > 
> > 
> 
>