Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft, requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history. As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down.
We would like to thank you for your support. For the past 4 years, it has been a blast. Unfortunately, it seems like it's the end of AutoPatcher as we know it.
Antonis Kaladis
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Autopatcher has been around for four years, and I have never heard of MS coming down on them...until now. Back in late 2006, Microsoft started to release their own ISO-9660 DVD5 image files which contains bundled patches for users which require them offline.
I guess MS didn't like the idea of Autopatcher making money off of their patches....
Answer - Release Autopatcher for free
Sorry technocrat but in this case I believe you have your facts a bit wrong.
ReplyDeleteAllow me to play devil's advocate.
Autopatcher's best use was made from those evil, pesky pirates.
You see, by using autopatcher, Mr Pirate could keep his MS-Windows-blah-blah box up to snuff. By doing this, essentially one of the main reasons for getting a legit copy of Widnows is gone out of the window (pardon the lame punt).
Since MS has invested an amount of resource to their genuine advantage program (I do not know the exact name, I use Linux :-) ), autopatcher was decreasing the efficiency of aforementioned program. From a business viewpoint, MS GenAdv program makes sense, why allocate resources to support stolen software? Out of benevolence for the sake of Internet? MS are not like that. It's more like "pay for a license or have fun with 20sec lifetime when connected to the internet".
I agree with the claim that autopatcher could come in handy for mass deployment of patches but still...
2 minor critisisms:
a) I believe that autopatcher was released for free, the order cost was to cover printing&shipping.
b) MS has issued a comment that autopatcher contained mutually exclusive patches, thus there was a probability of hurting overall system stability after installation.
Good point, I didn't look at it from the WGA angle, that makes more sense.
ReplyDeleteBut it seems that MS isn't using WGA as the reason..MS is expressing concern about the integrity of the patches pushed by Autopatcher. If malicious code is ever included in these patches, then MS would take the blame....and the image damage.
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