This shouldn't be legal. The software was clearly marketed as a classic fixed-in-time release, like the old CD releases, that would not be updated but would work indefinitely. Now they're going to boldly revoke the licenses???
I don't know if illegal, but it can be breach of contract, microsoft can say "oopsie, sorry, our bad" or fight it in court.
They sold a perpetual product that broke in sync for every user, and the reason it is breaking is because of a license checking feature.
Not an easy case, but it could be argued they advertised a product as perpetual while it's effectively an X years license.
The fact that the breakage is related to the license might be relevant, you can stop supporting license checks, but do it to the benefit of users, not conveniently to their detriment as an upsale mechanism
I believe the urgent deprecation timeline here may be related to ai labs using offline licensed Office in agents as part of workflows and Office integration. Microsoft wants _each_ agent instance to be a separate license[0]
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.
"literally no one would be surprised"
Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
This is a bizarrely revisionist take. Perhaps you weren't around at the time but that was not standard MO in the slightest. Obviously they were incredibly scummy in other ways, but that was not one of them.
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
I suppose it depends on what kind of users you have in mind; enthusiasts vs average users. Before they became outright user-hostile they were known for their anti-competitive behavior and buggy products. People were calling them "Micro$oft" by the 90s, at the latest. United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation started in '98.
They can only use it to run a particular tool related to a piece of MSO software. This may be a relatively short operation, a relatively small part of an agent's activity. Then hundreds of agents can use a single machine with MSO, similarly to how hundreds of CI/CD workers can collectively use a single machine dedicated e.g. to providing secrets and signing binaries.
The answer is far more comprehensive than I imagined.
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60
days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
Yeah if you don’t license Office correctly for an RDS server, you’d by contract be liable for a license for each user and device used to access the server.
Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.
Enforcing your rights under your contract by patching out some cert validation checks seems legal to me. Maybe not in places with anti-circumvention laws, but elsewhere it seems fine.
I’ve always bought a fresh perpetual license to office home and student with every new computer since 2005. That is four mac computers total and I assume ~$600 in office licenses over 21 years. Not a ton of money but not zero.
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
Yes, just to keep a current version in the decade. My first repurchase was either because moving from powerPC to Intel compatibility or wanting docx files with a big Office shift.
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
The last time I refreshed my Mac setup I didn't reinstall my standalone Microsoft Office, which I'd kept for the (very) occasional Word compatibility need.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0).
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documents on my Mac, but security considerations prevent this now.
Well, technically they never said the products would continue to function with the same functionality. But also this is Micro$oft, and I would've thought people would know by now that do only what's in their own interest.
It's entirely reasonable to expect the basic functionality of document and spreadsheet editors to edit documents and spreadsheets. If an editor no longer can edit, it's no longer functional. Microsoft seems to know this which is why they removed the "continue to function" clause from their end-of-support page.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
Look at generational C-suite shifts in Silicon Valley. Post the financial crisis, all regulatory efforts concentrated on banks and brokers for a decade, and tech firms were given a free rein. Boards apparently chose 'growth over anything else' types to lead.
The certificate was issued before the Nightmare Eclipse zero day thing started but I suppose it’s possible there are other certificates expiring around the same time that could be connected to the Nightmare deadline. Probably a coincidence though
Microsoft mistreated a security researcher, the researcher publicly dumped a horde of Microsoft zero days, Microsoft was decidedly miffed, the researcher says they'll "shatter Microsoft's bones" on July 14.
I am impacted by this and am furious about it. Mostly because I'm reading about it here and not from, you know, Microsoft, of whom I am a customer.
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
No, the problem is the software has an internal certificate that is about to expire.
This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.
That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.
As described, the licensing system will fail you into readonly locally unless you subscribe Office Clippy 365, buy Office 2024, apply Office 2021 updates, or (not listed) apply third-party licensing cracks for Office 2019.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
Sound like Microsoft's given me permission to make some binary patches to return functionality I already paid for, and to share it with my 7 billion closest friends. Cool.
I would encourage affected customers to go to small claims court. You’ll probably get a default judgment. Small claims court was created for just this type of issue.
IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
Another situation in which the fragility of CA TLS creates finite and very short software lifetimes. No software that uses CA TLS can say their applications "will continue to function". But Microsoft did and that's on them.
Maybe it wasn't which is worse, meaning Microsoft despite being in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world can't even get these basic details right. I think assuming this was intentional is actually giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt tbh.
The semantic function of modulators like "maybe" and "I think" implies the statement is hypothetical. My comment was intended to subvert the expectations around the intentionality behind Microsoft actions to make it look even worse than it is. It's got nothing to do with the enshitification of products in closed software immersed in our current economic ethos. I hope this clarifies my "understanding of [what] capitalism does to tech".
I don't mean to imply it isn't. I wouldn't be surpised. I just have no evidence of such. CA TLS is messy and pretty much impossible to get right even over medium timescales.
But it does reminds me of when Garmin GPS would make the storage filesystem limited to say, 3GB of read size, then offer "lifetime map updates" while knowing that in a few years the new map size will not be readable on old Garmin devices.
“ the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed”
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
Far from it. I'm a "shill" for my own private cause of trying to point out that CA TLS is so bad it cannot be differentiated from malicious behavior and offers as a cover for it. Also, did you not read, "But Microsoft did and that's on them.". I have no relation to microsoft.
Only morons use microsoft office products willingly. Haven't bought a copy of office, ever. I used to buy corporate laptops for $200 with $250 copies of office on them. Have been 100% on google docs since 2015.
Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law). Superiority complex about your proposed solution is ridiculous because Google can and will close down your account for any reason they see fit and you'll lose all your Google docs you made since 2015 (and more). It wouldn't be the first.
> Stop blaming the users when it's literally the company that's violating the contract/agreement (and potentially violating the law).
Why not both? I mean, if you leave your keys in your car and the window down, the car thief is definitely the one who should go to jail, but you're still an idiot.
I do agree that you have to be a special kind of stupid to take people to task for trusting Microsoft "perpetual" licenses while yourself trusting Google much more. I mean, just using Google in the first place is even dumber than buying the Microsoft license, but that's above and beyond the call.
Just use LibreOffice or other better tools like TeX instead of a WYSIWYG editor. With AI it is easier than ever to port existing documents, even if you have to OCR the original.
They sold a perpetual product that broke in sync for every user, and the reason it is breaking is because of a license checking feature.
Not an easy case, but it could be argued they advertised a product as perpetual while it's effectively an X years license.
The fact that the breakage is related to the license might be relevant, you can stop supporting license checks, but do it to the benefit of users, not conveniently to their detriment as an upsale mechanism
There was always a probability that Microsoft were going to funnel offline users into O365 at some point - but I imagined that to take place over months / years not weeks and days.
Buying a single license for thousands of agents may have expedited that. It has resulted in non-Microsoft labs having better ai integration into their products than Microsoft.
edit: just read the detail of the note - so this is a cert expiry as part of Apple dist that is being warned about ~2 months before it happens. Standalone on Mac has a term limit.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-executive-suggests...
I may be forced to use MS at work but at home I dont let their software past my router. A buddy of mine stayed for a few days while his place was being fixed. "Hey, why are my updates not happening?" "Oops, I forgot to tell you that all MS servers are inaccessible via the wifi."
And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.
(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
I don't care about their problem. It's their problem, not mine. They should not make their problem into my problem.
I don’t think this is related at all.
Microsoft's perpetual licenses have to "check in" periodically or they lose their activation.
They do sell truly offline licenses to high-trust cloak and dagger types, but they are not available to the unwashed masses.
"...run one instance of the software on your device (the licensed device), for use by one person at a time... In this agreement, “device” means a local hardware system (whether physical or virtual) with an internal storage device capable of running the software. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a device. For purposes of this agreement, “device” does not include any hardware system (whether physical or virtual) on which the software is installed or accessed solely for remote use over a network.
this license does not give you any right to ... use the software as server software or to operate the device as a server; use the software to offer commercial hosting services; make the software available for simultaneous use by more than one user over a network; install the software on a server for remote access or use over a network; or install the software on a device for use only by remote users
This license allows you to install only one instance of the software for use on one device, whether that device is physical or virtual. If you want to use the software on more than one virtual device, you must obtain a separate license for each instance.
Microsoft may require you to activate the software over the Internet in order for you to use the software. ... The software may periodically and automatically reconnect to the Internet to confirm the license associated with the licensed device. If you do not reconnect your device to the Internet when required as part of the activation or reactivation process, the software may operate with reduced functionality.
We hope we never have a dispute, but if we do, you and we agree to try for 60 days, upon receipt of a Notice of Dispute, to resolve it informally. If we can’t, you and we agree to binding individual arbitration before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), and not to sue in court in front of a judge or jury. ... Class action lawsuits, class-wide arbitrations, private attorney-general actions, requests for public injunctions and any other proceeding where someone acts in a representative capacity aren’t allowed."
https://www.microsoft.com/content/dam/microsoft/usetm/docume...
Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?
My resume is typeset in LaTeX and I don’t make many slide decks for personal use. I figure I can get a decent Tex template. I don’t use excel much anymore.
For my next mac I’ll probably just skip Office. I do not want a software subscription.
I also usually buy Sublime text + Merge and Cubase audio, USB overdrive, Graphana for svgs, maybe a few other licenses. I will buy and do not pirate software, devs and companies deserve compensation for their work. I also do not rent software. Though I do a small yearly donation ($50) to the Python software foundation because that language got me out of hands-on labor in labs.
I don’t care about agents at home. If Microsoft abandons a staple software package that has been a standard in personal computing since the 90’s then I’m only their customer at work lol.
Why? Just to upgrade or what?
The last time I bought Office was 2020 before returning to school (despite getting a student license). I do not see a good reason to now until someone in my household needs it for school.
They are responsible for awesome sales of MacBook Neo.
Looks like I can trash the installer now, save a little drive space.
Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
Buy yourself something nice every month with the money you save.
Unfortunately this kind of thing will continue since Microsoft can survive any slap on the wrist that might come their way for their sleazy practices. They've done it countless times throughout their existence. It has been paying off enough for them to keep doing it.
If Apple can release updates for ancient iOS versions to update certificates years after the fact, then these fucking assholes can do the same. The auto-update functionality is there. They are choosing not to use it.
perpetual has pejorative connotations and only started appearing in marketing speak when software rental became the new business model.
...and I'd almost be willing to bet that, as usual, the cracked version will remain perfectly functional.
How do I do that?
This is exactly the sort of scenario where I do not feel bad at all tracking down an online crack that disables the certificate check.
That said, it is probably not in Microsoft's best interest for people to have a legitimate reason to discover how much easier life can be if you pirate software.
Presumably we’ll know soon if network firewalling the licensing server helps, but I expect it’ll just delay the intentional failure by a few months at best.
maybe i'll eventually get a settlement for my multiple Office Mac licenses that won't buy me a latte. what a joke.
note to self: never buy anything from MSFT ever again.
The point would not be so much to help the customers but to cause the actual cost to Microsoft to be sufficiently high as to disincentivize corrupt behavior.
Class action lawsuits usually end up with settlements where the offender pays much less than the harm they caused, and those harmed get almost nothing. Even if it does go all the way to a court verdict, the sentence is usually insufficient. And the process is long and expensive.
I don't really know what the solution is, but the current system clearly isn't working. And I don't think it was really designed for the scale of mega corporations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of customers.
You lose access to it. You’re cooked.
But I'm fun at parties, I swear :P
But it does reminds me of when Garmin GPS would make the storage filesystem limited to say, 3GB of read size, then offer "lifetime map updates" while knowing that in a few years the new map size will not be readable on old Garmin devices.
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
Look we're using encryption; you like that right? More encryption == more secure == your peers will attack you if you don't like it.
Why not both? I mean, if you leave your keys in your car and the window down, the car thief is definitely the one who should go to jail, but you're still an idiot.
I do agree that you have to be a special kind of stupid to take people to task for trusting Microsoft "perpetual" licenses while yourself trusting Google much more. I mean, just using Google in the first place is even dumber than buying the Microsoft license, but that's above and beyond the call.