Agree that this should be in the documentation, but you can get into legal trouble if you directly link against microsoft.com in distributed code or binaries.
AFAICT this software would solve all its legal problems[1] if it replaced these hard links to clearly unlawful websites with user variables, $URI_TO_WIN10ISO or something. The fact that the README is basically lying to its users makes things even worse. I would go so far as to call this malware.
[1] In the sense of "successfully foisting legal difficulties onto end users"
Unless what you're saying is that this is a modified ISO to remove activation.
if thats the case then, I agree wholeheartedly. Just explaining why you dont/cant use the standard microsoft.com links.
I'm pretty sure these ISOs are NOT modified though I am a bit skeptical of some of these sources. Editing my first comment to clarify that I misread this...
Why the hell are we trying shitty workarounds to dockerizing Windows? It's all dumb legal crap we have to work around... All the while, there's this Linux thing that just works.
And you usually don't actually need Windows. It's an application ON windows you need. So, try Linux/wine docker and dockerize it in WINE.
I'm not searching for the exact wording, but hosting for an unlimited and unrestricted access is a distribution in a legal sense and is not allowed
Nothing the client is doing is unlawful afaict; I would prefer it if it was documented and easy to swap out the URL.
FWIW I had this exact issue when using vagrant/packer and it was always painful because we couldn’t target windows ISOs easily but equally we didnt want to self-host them on a public repo because of the dubious legality and negative speculation as we’re discussing here.
Those bobpony ISOs could be backdoored even if they’re not breaking laws for the client user. Would be good to walk through the legal way to generate the download link.
Nor I insisted or implied anything. Just something from my memory through the years of similar problems of the dubious legality of tools to ease the day to day tasks for people.
> Would be good to walk through the legal way to generate the download link.
There is a proper way, just like you said: an easy way to inject http/s URI. Hosting a bunch of ISOs is a solved problem, objectively even easier than hosting a Docker registry.
Glad we agree. :)
If you dont provide an URL they are automaticly downloaded from the Microsoft servers using this script: https://github.com/ElliotKillick/Mido It generates a completely legal download link automaticly.
And those bobpony ISOs for versions that the above Mido script does not support are all unmodified retail versions. I checked their SHA256 checksums, and I would invite anyone with doubts to do the same.