Bonum Certa Men Certa

OSChoice Addresses Microsoft Bundling Against Choice

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Summary: Call for action against unfair competition at the OEM channel

ONE impediment to GNU/Linux is the practice of Microsoft bundling inside OEMs' territories. Users never get to even choose their software, only their hardware. This is not fair competition -- an issue close to our hearts here at Techrights.



Iophk points out that "It is bundling, but there was a work-around that MS had to replace the illegal per-processor licensing." We covered this some years ago when we showed court evidence about it. [...]"

"Anyway," he adds, "the OSChoice idea would have to overcome that barrier, among others."

Here is a new article about OSChouice.eu. To quote:

It is worth to note that a judge in Florence Court, Italy, ruled in favour of a user that had long been demanding the refund of the unused Windows licence from HP. Similar sentences have been pronounced in France against Asus and Acer[3], as well as elsewhere around the world. I am unsure whether those verdicts would still hold today, since Microsoft has since updated its End User License Agreement (EULA). Indeed, the EULA for Microsoft Windows 7 states that, if in disagreement with the licensing terms, one should "contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy [and] comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the entire system on which the software is installed"[1]. It should also be underlined that the real price the consumer pays for an OEM Windows license is unknown, as the bills of PC purchases do not show the cost of the different components. Such licensing terms are a disrespectful violation of consumers' rights, and result in the de facto impossibility of buying many computer models without purchasing a Windows licence.

The retailers' offer of laptops without Windows pre-installed is extremely limited and often restricted to the very low (old and cheap) or very high (and expensive) segments of the market. Of the 571 laptops available on the web site of the Italian store eprice.it, as of August 1st 2011, only 13 machines are shipped with non Windows operating systems - namely GNU/Linux, Free Dos or none. In other words, only 2.3% of laptops available on the retail website come without Windows pre-installed.

Some may argue that the 2.3% offer of mainstream stores is more or less in line with the 2.8% market share of operating systems other than Windows and Mac OS[*]. I reject this critique because the low level of adoption may very well be a consequence — not the cause — of not offering a choice for operating systems.

Furthermore, Microsoft recently announced that the upcoming Windows 8 will require manufacturers to support secure boot in order to participate in its certification programme[2]. This could potentially make things really hard for Linux enthusiasts that purchase a computer with Microsoft Windows and then install their favourite distribution on top of it, as the computer might be locked by the vendor to only run the operating system it was sold with.


We wrote about this subject very extensively in the past. The regulators need to take action to make it possible to trivially buy PCs without Windows. At present, there is no fair competition because people who do not want Windows are often forced to pay for it. We will revisit this subject later because the wheels are moving [1, 2].

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