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The requirements you're implying should be imposed on contract and licensing law with these statements are staggering. You're basically demanding that all agreements be completely performed in person simultaneously or else they are unconscionable.

According to my sources, duress is defined as a "threat of harm made to compel a person to do something against his or her will or judgment; esp., a wrongful threat made by one person to compel a manifestation of seeming assent by another person to a transaction without real volition."

It seems to me that threatening to 'take back' software that has already been bought and paid for if you don't accept some new contract after you've already agreed to a common sense implied contract of "I spend this money, I own this software and, by natural common sense extension, the right to use it for it's intended purpose on my PC" is using a wrongful threat of harm to compel a person to 'click through' this agreement.

The wrongful threat of harm increases with the cost of the software or device involved. If you bought a brand new $10,000 alienware PC only to not have use of it because you don't like the EULA of Windows Vista, basically Microsoft is holding your $10,000 computer hostage after you've paid for it with the implicit, common sense contract of "You've spent $10,000 on a new computer including Windows Vista, that price includes the cost of licensing and media, you have the right to use your new computer"

By contrast, the GPL doesn't hold but the right to distribute modified software, which you never had any other right to, implied or otherwise. Even if you paid for the product, copyright law implicitly protects all copyrighted software from redistribution in any form without the contract.

Hell, the current regime still permits post-purchase refusal and refund

The current regime does NOT permit de facto post-purchase refusal and refund, becuase software retailers don't allow refunds on opened software, and computer vendors don't have a system in place for a reasonable person to recieve a refund for software they have declined to accept the EULA for. There is no reasonable ability to refuse the contract, because it requires going to extraordinary lengths like these. This man was denied a refund three times.

Good lord, almost every freaking consumer product you buy now has licenses included.

You'll have to point to examples. I've bought a lot of things over the past couple years, and the only thing that's come with a contract is software.

I've bought a truck, it came with no EULA. I've bought a skidoo, no EULA. I've bought dishes, pots, pans, and no EULA. I've bought furniture. No EULA. Got a great deal on a Queen size bed. No EULA. I've bought a wireless phone, and while it came with a piece of paper clarifying it's status under the appropriate laws regarding it's creation of interference which could affect other devices, but no EULA. Barbeque, despite being a dangerous gas appliance, no EULA. Propane for the barbeque, despite being an extremely dangerous substance which can't be dispensed without a proper license, no EULA.

I've even bought 3 cellular phones, 2 pay-as-you-go and 1 regular, and while I had to sign a contract before they'd accept my first payment and give me service for the regular phone, I didn't have to spend 2 seconds looking at a EULA, because there was none -- and there was none for the pay-as-you-go phones at all.

The only thing I've bought that has come with a EULA or equivilent contract to be agreed to after money has changed hands under threat of denial of service is software.

I'm sure there's contrary case law, but that's a failure of the legal system. Far too many geriatrics will accept a ridiculous legal arguement because the phrase 'on computers' is thrown in front, and that's going to be a roadblock for younger, less ignorant lawyers and judges as they transition into positions of judicial authority over the next decade.

Oh hell, I joined Slashdot in 1998 due to an anti-Microsoft story in The Australian (New York Times equivalent for reach/impact in Australia) on Geoffrey Bennett successfully coaxing a cheque out of Toshiba Australia for the Microsoft tax - it was the first time I'd even heard of Linux. The idea of a) a free functional alternative/improvement to Windows (a hardware-agnostic equivalent, before any 1990s Mac fans chime in); and b) someone sticking it to a company that was painfully arrogant to deal with even at that point was kind of liberating..

One of the first refunds I ever heard about was in 1998, by a friend of mine in Adelaide, Australia.

I hope you have a photo or other copy of the license, and stay focused. You will get people trying to run you around in circles so keep a log of who you talk with, when and about what - that will make it easier to escalate. Anyway, here are some examples:

• Getting a Windows Refund in California Small Claims Court
• Toshiba/Microsoft Saga
• User refund for no Windows option
• How to get a Windows tax refund

Stop whining and do something about it.

Here's a guy who got a refund for windows from his Toshiba laptop way back in '98

http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

I remember a few years ago there was some kind of talk about 'returning' windows licenses...does that work? did it ever?

Here are some URLs:

    http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

    http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/25/winrefun d.idg/

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/18/1539214.shtm l

The funny thing is that if you do not agree with Microsoft's license agreement, then the agreement that you did not agree to grants you the rights to a refund!?!? Or that is the theory.

I also thought that EULAs were deemed null and void in the first place. Especially the sneaky ones that don't tell you the EULA until after you open the box and then it tells you that you can't return it if you open the box.

I like Linux's EULA. I agree with that one 100%.

I've never read, nor cared about OS X's EULA. I like their stuff, and I'll buy it and use it. If they come knocking on my door because I click too hard on the keyboard or something, I'll deal with that when the time comes.

EULAs are bad, mmmkay

They've probably changed it now but the MS EULA used to allow you to get a refund if you didn't agree to the EULA.

http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

The problem was getting the money back.

The actual price (which is certainly different) is a trade secret. If only because MS doesn't want everyone else paying what Dell does for windows.

Just for background, if you haven't read already this fellows battle with Toshiba refunding him the cost on his windows 95 license many many years ago is an entertaining read.

This guy was the first to receive his refund in Australia :

http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

Here's how to do it in California :

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7040

For other gems google for "windows refund day"

What you want is something like the katie fs. it is a versioned filesystem. You can access the current version by saying vi /home/user/foo or an older version by saying vi /home/user/foo@@main/5 where main is the branch and 5 is the version number. I don't know if katie is still under active development anymore though.

I don't really care what the underlying system is. Ideally, its not something I notice most of the time. I agree with you that versioning is not something I care about at the level of the disk-filesystem. But at the level of a mounted filesystem, I like my files to be versioned. Once I can "mount" my subversion client, I'll be happy. Under that, I just want something works.

So when you say that we don't need versioning at the filesystem level, do you mean as a disk-access layer thing, or a user-mounted-thing level?

see Katie

It's a revision control system masquerading as an NFS filesystem/server. Pretty damn cool. It's 99% written in Perl.

A bit like this?

There's an abandoned project called SnapFS that worked as an extension of the ext3 filesystem, but it seems long dead. There's more mention of it here as well.

Hmmm...doing some Googling, I found this page that may have a useable download, but it's in alpha form.

It also looks like you can use LVM to create snapshots as well. I'll have to look at that more myself.

Katie lives at: http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/katie/

I thought it not being in the filesystem was adequate until I saw a demo of Katie, which lets you mount the repository as an NFS filesystem and access snapshots of the repository at certain points as different directories, take diffs just by running the standard diff between these directories, etc.

If only there was a stable (Katie's author describes it as "pre-alpha") and free piece of software to do it...

The guy who started the whole "windows refund" thing began the discussion right here on slashdot. LinuxMall's windows refund day site is down, but you can still find plenty of good info on Geoffrey's site and in the original slashdot article

If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC Manufacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to license the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact PC Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused products(s) for a refund.

A ClearCase-like system for Linux: Katie

• Versioned directories
• The ability to pull out any version as ClearCase dynamic views do (this can easily be done with a userland NFS server).
• The ability to live without being connected to a server (like CVS) and still work.
• Cross-platform support. On Win32 it would be nice if the front-end were a SMB server.

There is already an open-source project like this called Katie that seems qutie interesting.

People need to think outside their brains, and in regard to source control, I feel we need to make more packages that interface well with a good RDBMS rather than create our own RD functionality in 40ks. What's the use?

Anyone know a good system of incoroprating source control with a databases? Oracle and Postgres would do.

Katie (available here) uses postgresql to store all its metadata. Using a real database has certainly helped a lot in terms of ease of implementation (as you said, not reinventing the wheel).

I'm not saying it's a "good" (as in "usable") system yet, but it is definately getting there.

Certainly, when something like this is available, production-ready, and fast enough, I would choose to use it on all my boxes...

Some tips in there for others who wish to try. (Oh and it's a different Netcraft.)

Better?
A little (-:

You're missing the point. In the past, Microsoft has imposed certain regulations on their retailers, showing, to me at least, that MS has a lot of power over their resellers.

Compaq, as a corporate entity, is a MS reseller. It doesn't matter, what product line we're refering to, we're talking about corporate politics here.

The _original_ poster was being speculative. And as I said in my post, I doubt that this is the case this time, because of Compaq's recent support of Linux.

Just trying to clarify things.

I mean these laws are meant to protect the consumers from getting overcharged or bullied by big companies. Yet i havent seen a single consumer take the stand and say "They prevented me from downloading and installing Netscape!"

Some consumers have expressed annoyance that they were forced into buying an operating system they didn't want along with their computers. Some consumers even did something about it.

I doubt any of these people appeared as witnesses in court :-) But, hopefully, these stories were mentioned by a clueful lawyer as evidence of Microsoft's monopolistic position.

The only GPL'd GPS software that I have found available so far is gpsd and gpsclient by Remco Treffkorn. The gpsd will forward NMEA data via tcp/ip to a client which can then approbately present the information to the user. The advantage to the gpsd is that if the GPS reciever doesn't directly support NMEA then all a programmer has to do is modify gpsd to convert the data and then all gpsd clients would be able to use the non-NMEA reciever. Unforantly, there only appears to be two client for gpsd. The first being Mr. Treffkorn's gpsclient which only displays the locations of the GPS satilites. The other is mXmap which does display positions on a map but is a commerical/non-open source package.

The person that seems to have done the most GPL GPS development for Linux seems to be Geofrrey D. Bennett. However, it appears that his busy schedule hasn't provided him time to provide an initial release of his software yet. Also, the availablity of the TIGER data does not help his own purposes much since he is interested in detailed *Australia* data and TIGER appears only cover the US.

The most advanced GPS freeware seems to be Robin Lovelock's GPSS. However, it is neither open source or for Linux. Considering the advancements that have occured with WINElib, it make be possible that porting it would be easy if the source code was made available. I would be interested to see if Bruce Perens could convince Lovelock to release his work or parts of his work under GPL.