[lostgame]

I’m not sure, but is Windows 10 not slightly different from previous releases insofar as you can directly download the ISO for Windows 10?

Unless you had an MSDN subscription it was a little more difficult to grab an ISO back in the day.

Of course, it’s still illegal to modify and upload the modified version...but you’d think the patcher would be an even more obvious route than normal these days if it’s so easy to download an ISO.

I’m not a Windows person, could somebody explain this a little bit better for me?

[jeroenhd]

Copyright law does not grant you tge right to spread something you downloaded even if it was free. The original rights holder may decide who can and cannot host what part of their product for what reason. Free software usually permits you to redistribute the software you download, but there's no such freedom in closed source software. This is part of the "free as in speech" qualifier of open source software.

Microsoft does allow you to download the ISO for free, which is why I don't understand why they didn't include a patcher either.

Looking at the official twitter account for the project, it seems like the project maintainers (and likely their users) reside somewhere in the Middle East, given that they seem to speak Arabic. Perhaps the average Internet near the project's target audience are low enough to warrant uploading a customised, minimised ISO? I don't know, a patcher seems like a better choice to me. Maybe they'll switch models now because of the takedown?

[redis_mlc]

> Copyright law does not grant you the right to spread something you downloaded even if it was free.

Software source code is copyrightable (to a large extent, for the past 30 years) in the US, but a program exe might not be as there's no artistic expression at all in the bit pattern alone.

So an exe might just fall under license terms.

Source: I have successfully filed software copyrights and trademarks.

[sjwright]

That's so wrong it's almost painful. Copyright is the only reason why anyone pays attention to the license associated with compiled software. What would be the point of a license for an artefact not protected by copyright?

It also is absurd to suggest that there is artistic expression in source code but not in a direct translation of that same artistic expression.

And it's also worth remembering that binaries contain more than just executable machine code—they also contain strings, bitmaps etc. Are you claiming that strings and bitmaps cannot be copyrighted too?

[redis_mlc]

Actually there was a court case that agreed with my reasons, and that was the law initially.

It looks like object code became copyrightable in the US in 1983 through a few court cases:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ba/427b7142a61534006f4fda...

Don't know about other countries.

[sjwright]

An assertion that one court somewhere on the planet erred in a spectacularly ridiculous way isn’t evidence of anything.

[labawi]

Similarly, asserting a court erred in a spectacularly ridiculous way is not an argument.

Note that before 1989, rules in USA were quite different. Instead of: everything is IP, almost forever - explicit copyright registration was required for protection of works.

While object code was ruled as copyrightable for pretty obvious reasons, initial rulings seems quite consistent with law at the time. Current 100+ year copyright terms might seem similarly ridiculous to copyrights founders.

[iso1631]

That's a crazy viewpoint, I've never signed any license agreement with microsoft, but if I were to have a copy of a windows 10 ISO, or even just calc.exe, I wouldn't be allowed to share it

[redis_mlc]

No, it's not crazy, and copyright was only extended to binaries in 1983.

[mrkstu]

An OS iso is going to have a multitude of copyrighted assets beyond complied programs.

[p_l]

Getting legal windows ISO download has been possible since at least Vista, though it wasn't as easy as it is now.

The issue is that ninjutsu essentially provided a hacked up image to download, a derivative product, which they didn't have a license to distribute and thus copyright bit them in the arse.

[qilo]

Yes, now Microsoft allows everyone to download ISO.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

[user5994461]

The ISO is provided so you can download to your Windows 7 PC and upgrade in place to Windows 10. I did it on my old laptop, works well.

Microsoft really wants Windows 7 to go away and they actually give the tools to do so. I think it's great!

[effingwewt]

Respectfully disagree.

This is a story of a personal laptop of mine. Upgrading from Win 7 to win 8 with paid upgrade sometime after win 8 was 'stable'

The upgrade tool works fine until it doesn't.

When it chooses not to work, it will have you DL the upgrade files, as well as updates to OS, this can take forever and is a major point of failure for techs. (random hangs, reboots, loops, you name it)

But the really evil bullshit actually happens on successful upgrade. Oh that tool that said your laptop could 'upgrade fine' now can't, so sick of the BS revert to old installation.

Jk to find its no longer a valid bootable os now. had to repair win 7 installation to make bootable and was asked for product key... what? entered mine, sticker still gleaming on my laptop... Microsoft says invalid key! No worries, must be an accident, call MS CS. Am told that upon upgrading even though incomplete, I had willingly surrendered my old product key and it could never be used again. Ok... ask MS CS rep to please issue a new one? He says happily, but they no longer sell keys for windows 7, I could either buy an enterprise edition from them for if I remember correctly $7-800. In shock I looked it up and found at bestbuy for i think was 120...was advised to purchase from bestbuy as MS couldn't offer me the same( incidentally not long after this was when they extended the EOL timeline for win7).

Screw all that noise, I just ran a SLIC and never thought about it again, laptop's still chugging along today.

So personal anecdotes whatever, but I have worked on far more than my share of PCs, and upgrading became so convoluted early on it was invariably 100x faster and easier to backup and clean install. Even when everything 'just works' when upgrading, sometimes it doesn't. You will have errors everywhere, random hangs reboots etc.

It's infuriating and it has persisted as an issue from Win XP to 10.

[user5994461]

The upgrade path is only from Windows 7 to Windows 10 as far as I am aware. Microsoft extended licenses so that license for Windows 7 are valid for Windows 10 and vice versa. This might unfortunately have been after your story.

Windows XP never had an upgrade path (couldn't even change hardware like the motherboard safely) so it's progress in my mind. Windows 8 was a mess that was dropped shortly after release, I am sorry for all the souls who had to try it.

There is a very good backup tool embedded since Windows 7 that allows to snapshot and restore the system. Highly recommend to use.

[happycube]

Windows 10 is de facto shareware at this point. If you don't provide an activation code it simply puts a nag text on the bottom right. ;)

[joombaga]

As I understand it the ISO you get without an MSDN subscription is missing a bunch of updates.

[gruez]

Is that really an issue? With windows 10 there's a new version out every 6 months, so it's never going to be that out of date.