It started out in an unassuming manner: an industrious developer, Paul McNett, had a growing interest in Linux. He began playing around with the open-source implementation of Windows for Linux called WINE and wondered how his favorite development tool, Microsoft Visual . . . . It started out in an unassuming manner: an industrious developer, Paul McNett, had a growing interest in Linux. He began playing around with the open-source implementation of Windows for Linux called WINE and wondered how his favorite development tool, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, would run. It was slow going at first, but Paul persisted. He tracked down problems and submitted them to the WINE team. Little by little the problems were corrected, until Paul finally was able to run Visual FoxPro under WINE. He began telling other VFP developers about his work, and many were interested in learning more. One such person was Whil Hentzen. Whil is the editor of FoxTalk magazine, a multiple-year recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award, book publisher, host of his own FoxPro conference and the first ever recipient of the FoxPro Community Lifetime Achievement Award. Whil asked Paul to write an article detailing his work for FoxTalk, and Paul agreed. Whil also began incorporating a demo of Visual FoxPro running under WINE into his presentations at conferences and user group meetings. Whil was scheduled to give one such presentation recently to the Bay Area Association of Database Developers (BAADD). Shortly before his presentation, however, he received a phone call from a manager at Microsoft, who informed Whil that the material covered in Paul's FoxTalk article was in violation of the EULA (End-User License Agreement). As Whil was in the middle of dinner, the conversation was short and ended with a request for Microsoft's legal department to document its objection in writing. Understandably reluctant to incur the wrath of Microsoft's seemingly bottomless supply of lawyers, Whil did not demo VFP under WINE that night, but simplyexplained to the audience the reason why he couldn't. The link for this article located at LinuxJournal is no longer available. . It started out in an unassuming manner: an industrious developer, Paul McNett, had a growing interes. started, unassuming, manner, industrious, developer, mcnett, growing, interes. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
UPDATE: Karl-Heinz Zimmer requested that I more accurately portray the situation. Since I don't believe that I can say it any better than he can, I have enclosed his email to me at the bottom of the . . . . UPDATE: Karl-Heinz Zimmer requested that I more accurately portray the situation. Since I don't believe that I can say it any better than he can, I have enclosed his email to me at the bottom of the article. The WINE project is becoming increasingly popular and useful to those who would continue to use proprietary, free, and unported opensource software available only for Microsoft Windows. I've tested it with a few games I had purchased while I still used Windows, and it surprised me. The WINE project, and the two popular forks in the project, WineX, and Codeweavers WINE, have come along quite nicely, albeit it slowly, over the last few years. I give a lot of credit to the many developers that have poured a lot of their time into the project, but, with the good, the bad must be accepted. Recently a friend of mine, proficient in Linux, and not what you would call a 'newbie' to computing, received an email from a customer. The email was vague and included an attachment. In KMail, he decided to view the attachment, thinking it was simply an image. He clicks it, nothing happens, no viewer, no error, nothing but a few seconds of milling around, and then more nothing. Then, the wine notification pops up. By this time he had realized the file was a Windows executable, and that he'd just executed it with wine because of the MIME typing capabilities of KDE, and WINE's integration with the desktop. If he were running windows, I would've slapped him upside the head, everyone with any sense at all would've expected an odd email with an attachment to be a ready and willing virus or worm. Of course, this was no different, this attachment contained the worm known as WORM_KLEZ.H. However, because of the sense of security from worms of this nature bestowed to Linux users, by the same type of ignorance inassumption that spreads them amongst Windows users, he never expected the attachment to be a virus or worm that would infect and operate as it normally does. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened... click, boom, Klez goes nuts, etc., etc., etc. UPDATE: Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 18:25:23 +0200 From: Karl-Heinz Zimmer To: Eric Lubow Cc:
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