Thanks to the European Commission's antitrust like activities, European citizens will soon be presented with a ballot choice between twelve browsers when first using a newly purchased computer preloaded with the Microsoft Windows operating system.
But is this really progress? It's not much of a choice when you have to give up your freedom first in order to select a browser -- a few of which might be free software. Why not give citizens the option of purchasing the computer with a free software operating system like GNU/Linux, or with no operating system at all? The best way to fight monopoly isn't to give more choices after the most basic premise of the monopoly has already been agreed to -- it's to let people opt out of the monopoly from the beginning.
As I mentioned, that's a lot of computing power for a small price tag. Even at the 'sale price', I'm betting that Best Buy made money and Acer made money and other people down the line made money. Add to that Windows 7 Premium Home edition which, according to my local Future Shop, is $225 Canadian for a full version or $130 for an upgrade. We Linux and FOSS people call this the Microsoft tax. There were also a bunch of other pieces of software installed, some full versions and others time-limited trials. I don't really care, I wasn't going to run any of it anyhow. Assuming that this story is correct in saying that NewEgg offers OEM versions of Windows 7 for $110, then my notebook could have goes a full hundred dollars less, at the very least. So now, I could theoretically have gotten all this computing power for $500 or less. Just install Ubuntu or Kubuntu or any other version of Linux you prefer and you have a seriously inexpensive, seriously powerful, and infinitely more reliable machine than the Microsoft-taxed version can offer.
Comments
clayclamp
2010-01-08 21:21:49
If you don't know this then it means you're probably not doing your homework. If you do, then it means you're being deceptive. Which is it?
your_friend
2010-01-09 04:01:50
The market value of Microsoft's OS is less than zero. Given real choices, OEMs and users are migrating to free and zero cost systems. Microsoft has to pay people in it's ecosystem to keep using Windows so they might collect the Windows tax for them. The increasing cost of the performance gap between gnu/linux and Windows makes an increasing bribe cost for Microsoft.