So according to the developers of WINE, an open-source implementation of the Windows API’s for running Windows applications on non-Windows OS’es (*cough*Linux*cough*), Microsoft is now actively checking for WINE users on their download sites.

they appear to want to discriminate wine users, while this may be acceptable for operating system components/updates, this is probably a violation of anti-trust law for all other downloads.
It’s also the first time Microsoft acknowledges the existence of Wine.

This is an interesting turn of events on many levels. First, as has already been noted, this is the first time that Microsoft has effectively acknowleded WINE’s existence, even though the project has been around for 10 years or so. Microsoft is obviously concerned about a weakening grip on their control of the operating systems market, public rhetoric notwithstanding. This too has been known since ever since the publication of the now-infamous Halloween Memo in 1998.

Still, so long as Microsoft isn’t actively seeking to break WINE users’ installations, I’ll put this down to curiosity. If I were Microsoft and wanted to know how many people were actively using WINE, I’d probably try and track it through the download site, too. Still, Microsoft has a bad track record with regards to working and playing well with others, especially those are are trying to work well with their products.

This could be nothing, but it could also be a prelude to a new round of anti-Open Source nastiness. It may be warmup for some sort of “Trusted” computing initiative, where if they can’t promise the Content Industry (RIAA & MPAA) that their applications are running on “real” windows as opposed to being a Brain in a Jar (like WINE) then the Content Industry won’t dub them, “Sir Content Distribution Monopoly.”

Nevertheless, this little factoid, combined with the unleashing of the Internet Explorer team to put out IE7 independently of Longhorn, says to me that Microsoft is running scared. They haven’t led anywhere in years. All of their “Initiatives” are actually responses to inroads made by competitors or efforts to dominate markets that others created. Run through a quick list: Search. Anti-Virus & Anti-Spyware (ironically, you could argue that they “created” this market, too). DLL Hell and Patch Management. The list goes on. Meanwhile, Microsoft Research is spending $6 billion per year on loads of Very Smart People who produce things like Microsoft Bob and Toilets that run windows.

Back to the immediate question at hand: What is Microsoft really trying to accomplish here? Microsoft has a long history of trying to kill piracy through technical means. I’ve already covered that in a previous post. If they’re now getting ready to try and kill legal alternatives too, though, that’s a whole different story, more akin to their DR-DOS Sabotage back in the Windows 3.0 days:

The most potentially damaging allegation in Caldera’s complaint is that Microsoft sabotaged Caldera’s DR-DOS in 1991 by writing a secret line of Windows code that displayed a misleading and alarming error message to users trying to install Windows on computers that were running any operating system other than MS-DOS. According to internal Microsoft e-mail recently leaked to The Wall Street Journal, the encrypted code was intended to “put competitors on a treadmill,” as it is put in a 1991 message written by Windows development chief David Cole. “We need to make sure [Windows] only runs on top of MS-DOS . . . the less people know about exactly what gets done the better.”

I’m still waiting to see where this ultimately goes, but I’m not hopeful.