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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

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?

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>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)

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 Münster 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...

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.

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.

I completely disagree.

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.

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