Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program breaks Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API (applications program interface) that runs on x86 Linux and Unix OSes like Solaris and FreeBSD. In layman's terms, it means you can use Wine to run some Windows applications on Unix, rather than on a Windows machine.

Well, you can run and update them for now, anyway.

Microsoft has set WGA so that if it detects that a user is running a Microsoft application on Wine, they'll be blocked from updating their applications from Microsoft's download site. And as recently announced, WGA, toward the end of the year, will become mandatory for anyone wanting to upgrade copies of Windows or Microsoft applications.

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