Someone needs to be reminded that anticompetitive practices are illegal

Oiconomia@feddit.de to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 1143 points –
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If translation layer can be banned with EULA how is wine not dead yet? M$ loves Linux or what?

MS loves money. If Linux makes them money, great. If not, fuck it.

"...because it makes us money" could be put at the end of any slogan to make it 100% honest.

Well for sure they profit on Linux but I doubt they are using Wine.

The EULA of the CUDA SDK bans reverse engineering output of the SDK to make translation layers (and such compatibility aids in general).

That makes it more legally dangerous and/or harder for devs. It has no effect on anyone not using the SDK.

How is that Nvidia can ban reverse engineering and for example Nintendo can't. I'm sure they would love to just say in EULA that sorry but reverse engineering Switch is prohibited therefore every emulator is illegal

Nintendo firing all its lawyers atm because no one suggested this yet

Well, maybe they can't. This clause would probably not hold up in a lot of countries/courts. OTOH it would in others. It might take years of litigation to figure out.

So, if you want to work on this kind of thing, better consult a lawyer first. It will have a chilling effect and that's something.

US situation: https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq

I'm willing to bet that Linux is irrelevant to Microsoft. It doesn't threaten them, Microsoft has it's core business elsewhere

Their core business is hosting linux for other people at this point.

Microsoft do make money from Linux though. For example, Microsoft SQL Server runs on Linux, and you can use Linux in Azure (both of which are part of their core business).

Microsoft's operating system accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of server hosting, and their deathgrip on personal computing is starting to slip. (Particularly as Android has already replaced Windows as the most popular operating system.)

Microsoft is well past "not worried", looking at "too late to do anything about it" in the rear view mirror, and barreling toward "cease to exist if they don't continue to stick the landing on interoperability with Linux and Android".

Microsoft's long term relevance plan counts on cloud tools on Linux and their Office Suite on every platform.

Funny you should say that because they just dropped Android Subsystem for Windows

Yeah. I can't say I blame them, in that front.

As someone who often runs apps on hardware the app was never meant to run on, it's not great.

There may be a unified Android / Linux package type coming, when more laptops are touchscreens and more phones are dockable workstations. But I doubt the Windows kernel will have much to do with either.

Microsoft is earning crap loads of money from Android. The more Android phones are being sold, the more money Microsoft gets.

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not calling them out. Just pointing out that Microsoft is very aware that Windows isn't the future of the company, anymore.