Summary:Microsoft's notorious bundling tactics are under more fire in Europe, indicates the OpenSUSE Community Manager

SEVERAL months ago we saw the FFII and others campaigning to put an end to unwanted preinstalls of Microsoft Windows, whose numbers are on the decline anyway. Jos Poortvliet, a Dutch member of KDE and OpenSUSE, has just explained that there is another motion to address the problem:

[T]he well known Microsoft tax is unavoidable, even if you don't want or use it! They can't ship back the licenses as MS doesn't accept that. In effect, their customers have to pay Microsoft even though they don't use their software.

It is called Tying and illegal, but who has the financial power to do something about it? In the USA, this has been solved - MS has been ordered to accept customers who send back licenses and give them $30 for each. They don't make it easy but at least it is possible now. However, as far as I know, in NL there is no such a rule and I'm not sure about the rest of the EU either. Hettes is talking to the Department of Economics in the Netherlands but frankly, I'm not sure that'll help much.

Earlier today we found an odd new blog post that provides revisionism on the subject (no link needed, hopefully). Despite court evidence which shows us how Microsoft abused the OEMs, some people push the story that Windows is just the operating system of choice (but customers are not actually given choice) and that GNU/Linux became less popular on sub-notebooks for technical reasons as opposed to Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics (which we covered here 2-3 years ago). ⬆