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The title is a gross exaggeration of the policy change MS is making. Come 2021, what will go away is the ability to sign drivers for Windows 7 and 8 without passing WHQL/HLK compliance tests. That's it. You can still update compliant drivers, and you can still ship unsigned drivers if your users are willing to disable signing (not great, but there are plenty of shitty vendors who do this already).
Are there some number of important drivers that absolutely _can't_ (rather than currently don't) pass WHQL/HLK tests? Sure, but I can't help but feel that the main "victims" of this will be shitty vendors with buggy drivers that have lagged in supporting newer Windows variants (and have thus kept their users stuck on older variants). Is OSR one of these shitty vendors? Maybe not, and they are a paragon of quality stuck in a rare corner case of WHQL/HLK compliance. But it does sound like they have spent the last year complaining about the policy change rather than working to meet WHQL/HLK compliance - I don't see any evidence in their post of working with MS to improve the WHQL/HLK tests.
> You can still update compliant drivers
If your customers aren't willing to install unsigned drivers (and none of mine are), then the new driver will have to be put through the HLK tests and submitted to Msft for signing.
My issue isn't so much the testing/signing process, but that I've had an HCK test suite setup for the past 4 years that has worked just fine. It will have to be replaced w/an HLK test setup, the release engineer and I will have to learn a new process, and possibly get a new signing cert. It's not a trivial process, but one we can work through.
> the main "victims" of this will be shitty vendors with buggy drivers that lagged in supporting newer Windows variants
Some of us have to support customers who are running old versions of Windows, and sometimes we just need to add new features.
Think about what you're saying. There's no reason to denigrate vendors. Also, it's not always about bug fixes. A lot of us really care about the quality of our drivers and our customer's experience. It helps everyone stay in business.
I will absolutely denigrate vendors who lag behind on driver quality and support, particularly vendors who sell expensive equipment tied to ancient and shitty drivers who can't be bothered to update them support new Windows versions.
Outside of a small set of drivers that WHQL/HLK testing _may_ not work for, an unsigned driver means (1) the vendor doesn't care (i.e. "sold you expensive equipment and have you by the balls") and/or (2) the driver is a horrible buggy stability and security nightmare.
> A lot of us really care about the quality of our drivers and our customer's experience.
And for almost everyone, that means WHQL compliance.
> almost everyone
A 95% solution which completely fails to account for the remaining 5% is an enormous problem. As the article explains, HLK testing isn't really designed for non-hardware drivers and the solutions are strange at best.
You're not actually improving quality in this case, you're just making us do convoluted busywork.
> As the article explains, HLK testing isn't really designed for non-hardware drivers and the solutions are strange at best. You're not actually improving quality in this case, you're just making us do convoluted busywork.
There's a lot common to driver development that's separate from purely interacting with hardware (memory management, filesystem interaction, security, etc), some of which the HLK covers. Plenty of non-hardware drivers are capable of bringing down the system or breaking things if they do something bad in kernel mode.
To be clear, the article is complaining about their specific case in which they claim to have a driver that explicitly violates nominal filesystem invariants and "cannot" pass HLK testing, not that HLK compliance is inherently a bad fit. Whether or not a different set of tests or a negotiated "Contingency" test filter are possible is a different question.
Passing the WLKs is, absolutely, a best practice.
But, with all due respect, Mr. cpgxiii, you seem to not understand the vast extent of systems that use Windows.
It is simply NOT POSSIBLE to run the HLKs on certain hardware systems. Let me give you a few examples:
We write a driver for an unmanned aircraft. The driver runs on a custom processor box, with custom, on-board hardware, that's inside the aircraft. This custom system will not support the HLK client. Ever. The hardware for which we've written the driver cannot be separated from the custom system. This customer is now screwed.
We write a driver for a device that lives in a piece of industrial equipment. Even if we could pull the boards for which the driver was written, and stick them into a system that was capable of serving as an HLK client, the hardware is designed in such as a way that is designed to be never powered off. This device, therefore, does not support ANY non D0 power states. While it _might_ be possible to get his device to pass the HLKs with a LOT of work, it's unlikely.
There are a lot of drivers/devices in the world that fall into similar categories to those above.
And, there is the case of File System Isolation Minifilters. Any such driver will never pass all 80,000 WLK tests (that's a real number, by the way) due to the way these tests are written. We have worked with MSFT for YEARS to try to get the Minifilter tests to treat Isolation Minifilters specially. MSFT simply does not have sufficient motivation to make this happen.
So, yeah, easy to say "just pass the HLKs" -- I wish it were that easy.
> the hardware is designed in such as a way that is designed to be never powered off
What kind of equipment is like this? Or is it common for factory equipment or something? And what would be the consequence of a total power outage (including generators failing, I guess)?
This isn't something I've heard of before, it's interesting.
After power-down, the system reboots, and the process needs to restart. All in-progress activity is lost. There's no suspend; There's no hibernate. There's no "modern standby."
There's "The system was powered off, soooo... we're going to let the glass furnace cool down, and in a few hours when it's sufficiently cool and everything else in the plant is ready, we're going to start up the process again."
Needless to say, this isn't the sort of behavior that'll pass the HLKs.
What does WHQL/HLK involve and how does it work for independent developers and software-only drivers. I know that is generally not demographic of people writing windows drivers, but I'm curious as I have a half written driver that I plan to eventually finish, but the whole design is a bit odd.
I've run the HCK test suite (haven't tried the HLK, yet, bu from what I recall reading, the setup is similar). Basically, you need 2 servers, one to run HLK Studio and the Controller, and the other to run the HLK Client where the driver will be tested. Under HCK, the servers have a network connection.
You use the Studio/Controller UI to select and configure the tests and to find and select the driver on the remote server to be tested. Selecting tests is a bit odd on a software-only driver, but through trial-and-error and a lot of reading, I was able to find an appropriate set (it's a file system minifilter).
Once you start the tests, go find something else to do - the tests ran for about 12 hours in my case.
When you come back, you have to very carefully use the UI to collect the driver and the test results into a package file. You separately sign the package file with a cert that has been previously submitted to Msft (so they know who signed the package), then use the UI to upload the package to a Msft URL.
There's a website where you can view the signing process - it goes through several stages. In my case it took anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours to get through all the stages. At the end, if all goes well, you'll be able to download a zip file that contains your driver signed by Msft. Once you have your driver, put it in an installer (we used WiX [0]) along with any other components (like a nice userspace tool for configuration, or to run as a service and load the driver to do useful things)
For a software only driver, it's a lot of busy work. I really don't think the HCK exercised my driver at all. Nevertheless, either me or the release engineer at work got through the process several times.
[0]:
How do you permanently disable signing on 64-bit win7? Last I checked it wasn't possible to do cleanly, you end up needing user interaction for every boot, or you get a nag border.
So, its a big deal.
The nag border is only visible with the desktop showing, it's not a big deal at all.
I haven't checked in a while if a patch has appeared, but it's probably no harder than cracking activation, which is already well done.
Once MS stops issuing updates, you don't have to worry about them reverting your changes.
> But it does sound like they have spent the last year complaining about the policy change rather than working to meet WHQL/HLK compliance
They seem to be a company doing many custom development and will have hundreds (thousands?) of separate projects. It seems reasonable they wouldn't try to pass HLK for everything just in case it needs work in the future.
Yeah, I have a hard time sympathizing with this. Windows drivers have become so much more stable since WHQL/HLK compliance became a thing.
Yet another reason why centralized code signing is anti-user and a net negative. You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer.
Well, Msft attempts to use HCK/HLK to help ensure that the drivers out there are more stable. Once upon a time, there was no signing and some drivers caused the very unfriendly BSOD and Msft got the blame. There are a lot fewer of those today than there were before Msft insisted upon testing/signing things.
Nvidia drivers were once responsible for 30% of all Windows Vista crashes.
https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...
Back in the day my Windows system would BSOD every other week for no apparent reason. I cant remember the last time I had that on my Win10 machine; I guess this was an overall improvement to consumers. I sympathise with the driver creators here, but I wouldn't want to go back to those BSOD times, just so that some niche drivers can be signed on Win7 systems.
> You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer.
This is the same as stating that you prefer many orders of magnitude more users to have unstable or insecure systems because they use products by a negligent vendor or are conned. That's hardly âanti-userâ by any metric which covers mainstream users.
To me, this is an argument that code signing systems need to be tightly regulated to prevent abusing the system for reasons other than quality testing and accurate labeling.
I see it as a reason to applaud centralized code signing. You _can_ install anything you want, anyway, and I want filters so that the drivers I do install aren't shovelware. This certification process is one of those filters.
Can drivers be signed by any CA trusted by the system or does it have to be the Microsoft CA? Shitty solution but if you're installing someone's (otherwise unsigned) driver, you're already placing a lot of trust in them.
Allowing unsigned drivers to be installed by the general user base seems more anti-user, no?
My naive understanding is that drivers are low-level and thus malicious drivers would have more net negative impact on an unsuspecting non-technical user (relative to a piece of malicious non-driver code).
Not to mention that if a user really wants to, they can install unsigned drivers.
I'd like to read the article but the sidebar keeps moving up and down the page and it's really irritating.
As is often the case, the article renders fine with JavaScript and CSS disabled. This sort of scenario is why I run uMatrix in whitelist mode, with JS/CSS always disabled by default. These technologies are net negatives to me, I only enable them on select websites and my browsing experience is more pleasant on average because of it.
JS sure, but what benefit comes from disabling CSS? This is the first time I've heard of anyone doing so.
Often obnoxious stuff like headers that follow you down the page are implemented in CSS. It also neatly deals with sites using gray on white text, absurdly narrow text columns, etc. It also neuters most cookie notices and similar BS that uses CSS to block visibility of the article until you remove it with ublock origin's element zapper. Instead of zapping things all the time on each new site I visit, I nuke it first and ask questions later.
I think it is also used for tracking people.
https://github.com/Bogdaan/spycss
Or maybe he just likes content without flashiness and annoying sidebars, etc
Incompetent web design. CSS is a powerful tool of destruction, by taking it away from webdevs the web becomes much less broken.
I disable javascript like you do- completely different experience. Some sites seem to manage sort of pops though - I believed it must have been html5, but now I'll try css
Damn I never thought of doing it this way, how logical..
Every browser other than Chrome has a built-in Reader mode that just shows you the plain text of the article in your chosen width, color, and typeface.
It's painful to repeatedly witness people voluntarily buy into ecosystems maintained by people with perverse incentives. You can't fault MS, making more money is their raison d'etre.
If you care at all, even the smallest amount, explore the alternatives.
Are there more people releasing drivers for Linux 2.6 or 3.9 (the versions released ~when Win 7 and Win 8 launched respectively)? Or for OpenBSD 4.4?
I think the state of support for Linux and open source in general is much, much worse than for commercial software.
No one is maintaining >10 year old software. Especially not for free.
Do note that this is not a story about not being able to run Win 7 anymore - it's simply about having it more difficult to release and install new drivers on it.
Yes? RHEL 6 uses kernel 2.6 and RHEL 7 uses kernel 3.10. Both are actively maintained and supported.
They are maintained and supported by RedHat, but you can't find for example AMD Radeon drivers for their latest generation for RHEL6 (though they do have them for RHEL 7.9).
Rhel 6 is moving to extended life phase in another month. At that point no bug fixes, security fixes, hardware enablement or root-cause analysis
I wouldn't say that is actively maintained or supported.
RHEL certanly isn't something that's maintained for free for everyone though. You pay a rather hefty fee for this kind of support.
Microsoft did (still?) offer a free upgrade path from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 for years so I doubt this is really for "getting money from our customers" but more "we want to stop supporting these old platforms at some point"
They still make money on free Win10 by spying on your activity, showing ads, and aggressively pushing purchase from their store.
Strange, I run windows 10 and I never see ads, and I've never used the windows store either.
We all know you're exaggerating massively with the spying as well, but hey, MS Haters will be haters.
Last I checked (about a year ago) you could still run the upgrade tool, and it'd go through the licensing registration process just fine.
I wouldn't do that if it weren't a personal machine, however, because the "official" upgrade process ended a long time ago. Even using it for a home office might put you into questionable legal territory, but it's still possible.
I do think your last statement is more accurate, though. It really feels that they're subversively pushing as many people away from Win7/8 as possible by unofficially allowing upgrades through existing channels. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't find it especially nefarious.
I don't even use Windows (I have family that does). I'm a Linux user.
You don't even need to use the upgrade tool. Windows 10 clean installs from the iso will let you manually input the Windows 7 key you already possess and the activation server will accept it. The 7 key is whitelisted only for 10. It will not work for 8.
You can actually crack Win7 and will get a "legit" Win10 license during the upgrade ...
Windows Server 2012 R2 is impacted by this decision. It's still under support until 2023-01. They made the decision when they wanted to stop supporting the old platform already.
If it's still supported, surely it'll receive updates then?
Not all computers could be upgraded , plus Windows upgrades is not 100% guaranteed to just work. I have a Win7 machine that is used sometimes by my son, I don't want to waste my time to attempt some upgrade or reinstall Windows then all the drivers and programs/games so that PC will run Win7 until it dies.
Not only free, but forced!
My Windows 7 PC was never forcibly upgraded. I don't know what you are talking about
> I don't know what you are talking about
New details emerge about forced Windows 10 upgrade -- and how to block it
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3029613/new-details-em...
Microsoftâs latest trick: Clicking âXâ to dismiss Windows 10 upgrade doesnât stop install
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/229040-microsofts-latest...
Microsoft accused of Windows 10 upgrade 'nasty trick'
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36367221
Forced is clearly the wrong word, but Microsoft's push to move users of older Windows versions onto 10 was aggressive and, some have argued, wilfully deceptive. The bottom line is that someone previously using Windows 7 who followed the advice about promptly installing recommended updates would probably now be running Windows 10. To avoid that, you had to know what was going on and actively do something else, and there are plenty of anecdotes of people who tried to do so and still made a mistake somewhere and ended up on 10 when they didn't want to.
> Forced is clearly the wrong word ...
No, it's not. Many users had their Win 7 computer "upgraded" to Win 10 even when they expressly didn't want that to happen.
I'm literally typing this message on a Windows 7 PC. If Microsoft had _forced_ those to upgrade to Windows 10, how is that possible?
Even some basic research via any search engine will answer that question. ;)
Why would I need to do any research? If the "forced" claim were true, it would be literally impossible for me to be doing what I'm doing right now.
Microsoft might have tried to deceive or even coerce users of its older operating systems in order to get them to accept an upgrade. However, the upgrade was not forced, because you could (and some people did) avoid moving to the new version.
It does not usefully advance the discussion about Microsoft's behaviour to misrepresent what happened. There's plenty to criticise without the hyperbole, after all.
There was certainly a semi-forced situation at one point. My mom's Windows 7 laptop started the Windows 10 installation automatically one night, with no questions asked. The computer just restarted and started installing it.
Now the reason I say semi-forced is that it was still possible to cancel it. The automatic process got paused at the EULA acceptance screen and if you chose not to accept the license terms then the installer would start a lengthy rollback process and eventually get you back to Windows 7.
On my own computer I never experienced this because I proactively chose _hide update_ for any Windows 10 related patch.
This is nothing. My machine is on Windows 10 1909 but the May 2020 as well as the Oct 2020 Win 10 updates have both been held back because of Conexant driver incompatibility causing blue screen. MS stated back in June they are working with Synaptics to roll out an updated driver but we're nearly in Nov now and there has been no further announcement. Looks like they can't update the driver or the number of incompatible machines are low enough for them not to bother, essentially saying "upgrade your machine or just stay on 1909 till EOL, not our problem."
Drivers are a huge pain on both Windows as well as Linux. We're at 2020 now and still software development hasn't been able to separate drivers from the operating system, make them OS agnostic and easily updatable without all sorts of breakages.
If you have an HP EliteBook G4 or similar: I noticed HP SoftPaq now has an updated Conexant driver that claims to work on Windows 10 2004 and 20H2 in its release notes. I installed that and forced an update using Windows 10 Update Assistant to 2004 and then 20H2. I haven't seen any bluescreens.
There's no commercial vendor without "perverse incentives" if "making money" is on the list. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, or anyone else.
Essentially you're arguing that it is Linux or nothing, but in a very roundabout way.
Linux is not the only OSS Operating system. OpenBSD, FreeBSD exist, just off the top of my head
It isn't a real alternative if it is a bad fit for what you're trying to do with it, which those are for many many people.
Some are more perverse than others, depending on who their customer is.
Most of us don't really have a choice though. In larger companies a lot of decisions are being made by higher-ups before technical people even get a chance to look into the issue.
There is Windows and MacOS for users that want a computer that works. FOSS alternatives are for developers and power users that want a computer like someone wants a project car.
I say this as a happy Linux user at home. But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target. In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. At home I still have to dual boot Windows to play games with my friends.
There really isn't an alternative, even if you wanted to pay money for it.
If you want an example of this that I've been fighting for the last week, Steam doesn't launch after the first installation on my machine running Pop!_OS 20.04. There's a half dozen things I've tried to fix that, all the related issues are unresolved or partially resolved from comments on GitHub, and my current solution is to reboot and use Windows. Linux is not suitable for personal computing today.
> There is Windows and MacOS for users that want a computer that works.
This may have been true in 200x, but these days, both of those aren't so hot with respect to quality and just working.
> _But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target._
> _At home I still have to dual boot Windows to play games with my friends._
In most cases you may execute such programs & games under Linux via WINE (+ Mono, PlayOnLinux, Winetricks; if needed).[0]
> _In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word._
Use _LibreOffice Impress_, _Calc_, and _Writer_ instead.[1]
> _There really isn't an alternative, even if you wanted to pay money for it._
Scroll up and read again.
[0]
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Wine
[1]
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/03/24/libreoff...
In some cases you can run things under WINE, and they work or mostly work. Unfortunately, in plenty more cases, you can't. That goes for games, creative software, business admin tools, and just about anything else.
And while LibreOffice isn't bad as an office suite in its own right, MS Office is the still _de facto_ standard in many lines of work, and being 95% compatible when you export as an Excel spreadsheet or Word document just doesn't cut it for professional use.
Until not just Windows _but also the major software packages that run on it_ are no longer the dominant standards, it's always going to be an uphill battle moving normal people onto an alternative platform like Linux, and one that often can't be won today.
> In most cases you may execute such programs & games under Linux via WINE (+ Mono, PlayOnLinux, Winetricks; if needed).
I do this for most games I want to play (and many are available natively on Linux these days!) but there are a few games with intrusive DRM that stop you from playing them on Linux.
I have an older laptop lying around running Windows that I use for those if theyâre not too demanding. Otherwise Iâll buy them on a console, though I tend to only buy consoles after theyâve been out for several years these days.
> _few games with intrusive DRM that stop you from playing them on Linux._
Is it from Steam? (FTR, There is already Steam for Linux too)
BTW, report any issues with apps & games not working under WINE to WineHQ devs.[0]
[0]
No, usually MMOs with things like GameGuard. Steam stuff generally works fine.
You don't understand what I'm talking about.
Wine does not solve my problems, especially when DRM or anticheat is involved. It also doesn't work well on HDPI monitors. I have a few ancient Windows programs I've tried to use in Wine that are very hard to read on a 4K monitor, while on Windows they look fine. It would have been ok 10 years ago, but not for my eyes today
When I say "needed to use" it's not synonymous with "there was no other software with similar functionality." It means "I need to create and share documents or files with colleagues, fellow students, and professors, as well as work with them in the same room." LibreOffice is not the solution to this problem, GSuite is. Partially.
Before getting snarky, I encourage you to think a bit more critically about what it entails for non-power user to get up to speed on Linux. The command line is out of the question, reconfiguring a host of config files or buried options and googling through Ubuntu and stack overflow posts isn't a solution, and constantly tweaking things just to get to a point where "double click this icon" works isn't a solution when on windows and MacOS you don't have those issues.
That's what I mean by "there isn't an alternative."
What alternatives? There are no commercial alternatives in my domain (vaccines). Windows is the standard.
Microsoft has always been honest about when win7 would go EoL so everyone knew what they signed on for. They have a whole roadmap.
Microsoft has repeatedly announced strict changes to driver signing policy while not actually enforcing them. Like last time I checked, their docs still claim that the HLK tests are required for drivers on Windows Server 2019, but in practice attestation signing works fine.
I _hope_ that will also be the case here.
This seems a common pattern with Microsoft, I've seen the same with changes to Printer Drivers.
Anyone running these systems probably have hardware in place and donât plan on changing said hardware. The reason these systems/OS are in place is because of, âIf itâs not broken, donât fix itâ. Probably not jumping to update drivers.
Apple stopped supporting Mountain Lion, released when windows 8 was released, in 2015.
I assume that doesn't prevent you from using it and installing software and drivers? Just because something stops being supported doesn't mean it should stop working as it did before.
I mean, neither will Windows 7 and 8.
If the policy is followed, it sounds like driver signing will stop working as it did before. Presumably drivers signed before a certain date will work, but drivers signed after that won't. Or something.
Sure, but that doesn't "prevent you from using it and installing software and drivers". You can still install previously signed drivers. You can even turn on unsigned driver installation and install unsigned drivers.
Nothing is really changing on the user's side. They might not get new drivers going forward if the company doesn't want to or can't pass HKL, but Windows 7 is out of support at this point. Windows 8 is still supported, to be fair, but I don't know of many people who actually run it; it's either 7 or 10.
Can anyone explain to my why people are creating new embedded systems with Windows?
It seems to me that the developer experience, ecosystem and driver support is worse in literally every single way, not to mention you don't have control over the OS code.
Working video support (without hardware acceleration) out of the box without any external drivers for all current and future graphics cards because they actually implement the âcoreâ vga spec (plus all the official and unofficial revisions to get higher resolutions working).
We have to ship updates to our bootable Linux and BSD applications every six months just so customers donât get stuck in text mode, or worse yet, without a frame buffer after BIOS posts. Never had that problem with WinPE (RIP).
My go-to solution to booting an older Linux version on a newer GPU is `nomodeset` and possibly other flags that force-disable the use of device-specific drivers. I don't see how this is different on Windows.
That wasnât a hypothetical, and yes, I looked for simple kernel cmdline parameters before hacking away at the VGA and UEFI framebuffer drivers in the kernel.
Iâm not talking about KMS, thatâs another ballgame altogether. You ship a fixed image starting up on unknown hardware that could have any card from 1999 to 2020 in it. You canât load all drivers at startup because a) thatâs crazy talk, b) many canât be loaded simultaneously anyway. You can manually identify the VID and PID and create a database but itâs a monumental task, and youâre bound to miss some (and what about new releases?). You donât want to ship with every driver under the sun anyway, because thatâs huge, there are licensing issues, and many are buggy or error prone on recent kernel releases. All you want is a basic driver to give you a software-accelerated framebuffer and use the generic VGA/SVGA/XVGA/whatever __standards__ to init the hardware, give you a workable resolution for GUI mode applications, query the monitor and use the EDID database to select a resolution and refresh rate supported by both the hardware and the attached display device, use the correct aspect ratio, avoid overscan or unnecessary scaling, etc. and give you an abstraction supported by your desktop environment including the window manager and your applications, without needing to hack away at every program you ship with to get them to support the sw framebuffer.
Xfree86 was such an effort but a) itâs long dead, and b) never really got there.
Windows doesn't require a list of unspecified kernel flags to get a UI, it just gets one.
How does this differ from the "VESA" linux driver?
They start at the same place but it works better (more resolutions, greater hardware support, fewer bugs, etc), includes features that are outside the scope of the driver itself in the Linux design (EDID querying and matching for dynamic resolution and refresh rate detection), performs much better when doing software-accelerated operations, has driver/abstraction-level DPI scaling, and is compatible with all DE/software that doesnât try to directly use OpenGL.
Mostly itâs just that the video abstraction on Linux is driver-dependent (eg access to video device/fb is dependent on choice of driver) functioning at a lower level than the Windows equivalent.
Iâm not sure if itâs true but I hear Wayland is throwing away all support for non-drm framebuffers?
What Microsoft is doing should be illegal. If you buy a product, you should be able to use it throughout your lifetime or until the product naturally cease to operate. In this case, Microsoft should release an open source tool to cross sign the drivers if they don't want to support it or add an update that disables checking for signatures.
If a company can disable software features in the future, then you are no buying the product but merely renting it.
Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires. That wouldn't fly, so why software companies are allowed to do this?
>If you buy a product...
Ah, but you don't buy this, you license it. That's where they get you. I agree it's very anti-consumer, but it's going to get worse.
> Imagine if you bought a car and then 5 years later company rep would come in and welded the wheels so that you wouldn't be able to upgrade your tires.
Did I mention it will get worse? Maybe not with the silly welding tires example, but we're basically there. John Deere, Tesla, Apple, and others are all deploying clever tactics to lock the consumer out of the things they buy so that they can rake in even more cash.
You buy a copy of Windows binary code. In Germany you can even resell your copy of Windows binary code - for example when selling your old computer to somebody else.
> You buy a copy of Windows binary code.
No you don't. You buy a limited license to use and replicate the binary for personal use.
You don't "buy" anything but the physical medium the binary code shipped on. Transferring ownership of a medium containing the binary code to a third party (bought or otherwise) ends your license to use the binary, no matter if you retain a physical copy.
You also don't have the right to use the binary in ways not covered by the license (e.g. reverse engineering outside of the given right to ensure compatibility). This may include executing a copy on more than one machine or by a third party.
Finally, there's also a difference between violating licensing terms and such violations being persecuted criminally.
An individual might get away with it, but as soon as either commercial activity is so much as suspected or a company does it, there will be legal consequences in Germany, too.
Source: first hand experience with licensing audits in several companies involving multiple software vendors (not just Microsoft)
You might want to read the EULA (it has a specific provision for Germany and Austria by the way). Soething that is true in the US isn't necessarily true in other places.
> You might want to read the EULA
And you might want to read EuGH Rs. C-128/11.
Nowhere does it allow reselling used software that is still activated. It only concerns the right to make copies for personal use (well, duh), and reselling non-activated keys as well as software packages associated with it.
The license terms concerning the use (e.g. activation) are NOT subject of the ruling. Why is that so hard to understand? Copying software and the license to USE said software legally are two different issues.
It's akin to the difference between property and possession. Being in possession of and selling a (digital) copy of a piece of software doesn't imply _ownership_ of said software and the license involved.
But please feel free to provide me with a ruling that says otherwise.
This may be true in US, but in Germany it is not... and this was decided by Germany's supreme court...
Sources, please.
reality says otherwise:
https://www.dr-bahr.com/news/verkauf-eines-nicht-aktivierten...
Why is it that people still don't understand the difference between selling software licenses and _using_ said licenses?
The decision was explicitly about _non-activated_ licences and didn't include the right to continue using a license of a sold product.
EuGH C128/11 explicitly states that you have to delete/invalidate any copy of used software that you sell.
The Vergabekammer MĂŒnster Az. VK 1-2/16 doesn't disagree wih that ruling either and neither do BGH Rs. I ZR 129/08 and Az. I ZR 8/13, which simply state that reselling volume licences is allowed.
Nowhere was a ruling made that didn't require uninstalling and deleting existing installations after resale.
OK, but in this case you can still "resell your copy of Windows binary code" - which you didn't use... And this is not permitted in the USA, while it is permitted in Germany...
It's like buying a property with a charge and restrictions on it. Some of these restrictions should be made illegal. There is no business case for them apart from extracting money from customers for no value for them. Any restriction should only be legal if it helps the product to work as intended or is required by any health and safety regulations. A restriction that forces customer to buy an "upgraded" product should never be allowed.
Adobe now prevents the reinstallation of CS2 and CS3 (even with original install discs).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865450
This desperately needs to be regulated. Companies should not be allowed to do this. How is it different from extortion?
You have missed an important fact: Adobe was planning this all along in 2013 and actually offered fully offline installers (includimg activation) for qualifying versions. This is definitely a bummer if you haven't redeem it, but Adobe have publicly (might be questionable, but we have received a mail about it) stated that.
TLDR: You're screwed if you did nothing for 7 years that the redeem option is available.
Is it not possible to install unsigned drivers on Windows 7?
You won't get support from Microsoft in doing so, but you'll be able to continue using Windows 7 and will have to find an alternative way of validating the drivers.
I don't know about windows 7, but on win10, one has to 1. generate one's own key 2. sign the driver 3. turn on test signing mode, which puts a watermark in the bottom-right of the desktop background, somewhat like "activate windows" watermark but only on background. Oh, and 1. and 2. are tedious, poorly-documented processes for which microsoft provides almost no support.
There are/will be if there already aren't patches which will disable the checks completely. With win10 it's a moving target, but 7 is not anymore so you don't have to worry about MS reverting your changes in an update.
Completely agree -- this is even worse for mobile phones, where often it's impossible to even upgrade the OS past the one it shipped with. The second a company stops supporting a product, they should be legally required to fully unlock the bootloader/drivers/etc.
Don't forget about OS updates that disable phone features. For example Samsung ran an update that disabled phone call recording. If you wanted a phone so you can record your calls to elderly parents to have memories of them, you could no longer do that after updating the phone and there was no warning that such update does that.
I completely disagree.
I don't see the issue here. If you're going to update your drivers for an antiquated OS, might as well just upgrade it im the process. Switching to Linux would also give you much more flexibility for long-term maintenance.
Windows 8.1 is under extended support until January 10, 2023.[0] Why can Microsoft still support that system up to that date, but not let anyone else?
[0]
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/windows#what-...
Because they intentionally want to kill it, to force people into buying the new windows version.
The win10 update is still free.
Windows Server 2012 R2 is impacted. Upgrades are not free. Upgrading the server necessitates updating Client Access Licenses (either purchased per-device or per-user) as well. Costs could be significant. If you've got a dependency on a driver that can't pass WHQL and you need an update, post July 2021, your only choice will be to dump Windows Server 2012 R2.
I have at least one customer who is stuck on Server 2012 (not even R2). I hope they will be able to upgrade their servers soon. In the meantime, if I need to update my driver, I'll have to replace my HCK test suite with the HLK test suite, learn the new process, and hope the driver passes.
Why someone should install a new version of system that introduces all kind of spying and data harvesting just to use it as they used to?
It's like saying oh you need to change the oil, why don't you buy a new car while at it?
And a UI that threw away a decade+ of desktop user experience metrics for a half baked not quite tablet UI on the desktop that still to this day is sub-optimal to the UI they had in win95.
Windows Server 2012 R2 is in support until 2023. Businesses have planned lifecycles and budgeting around that date.
That likely requires more in depth regulatory approval than just updating the driver for things like medical devices.
Read the article through for a much more comprensive view of the problem. It's not that simple.