OT: Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[taharka]

Howdy,

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 20:04 +0000, David Fletcher wrote:
> On Monday 13 Feb 2006 19:39, Temlakos wrote:
> >
> >
> > And if you /don't want/ MS Windows, you're still stuck with paying for
> > it.
> 
> Not necessarily. Look at this page:-
> 
> http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbsextra.html?NNB-360

OK, but they don't offer alternative OS preinstallation either. Also, if
ordering from the U.S. (if it is even possible), I'd imagine it would be
cheaper/less expensive to buy locally with XP preinstalled :-(

> > pre-installed OS. MS got wise to that and amended their EULA so that
> > such returns were essentially at the discretion of the vendor--and then
> > the vendors refused to honor returns of the OS. And these days, Dell
> > ships computers /without/ any MS installation disks, so that there's
> > nothing physical to return! (That, and you couldn't load Windows on a
> > second machine even if in some fit of multimedia mania you wanted to.)
> >
> > Result: Microsoft sells license after license for its OS, that many
> > people will never use. No updates, either. Now where do I, as an
> > organizer of corporations and LLC's, go to set up a business model
> > whereby I might actually induce people to pay for /nothing at all/?
> >
> > The only cure for this is going to be for someone to make widely
> > available the names of the original manufacturers of laptop computers
> > that get a Dell or HP label slapped on them, so that we Linux users can
> > go /directly to them/ to buy our machines, and /not a penny/ (or a
> > centime, or a pfennig, or a drachma, or a kopeck, or a yen, or whatever)
> > will go to Microsoft for software and updates that we will not use.
> >
> > Temlakos
> 
> -- 
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