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OSIA Dismisses Gartner Linux Piracy Claim

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the shooting-back dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "The Inquirer is reporting that a claim by Gartner that Linux desktops are used for pirated copies of windows has been dismissed by the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA). OSIA told The Sydney Morning Herald that 'if Gartner's conclusion that pre-installing Linux encouraged people to steal copies of Windows were correct.... It would be possible to state that pre-installing Windows encourages people to pirate application software.'"

4 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There should be an MS tax, no there shouldn't.. by jmoen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes you can, we do that at work.

    You can get PC's, Workstations and Servers without an OS preloaded or FreeDOS (on a bootable CD) but don't know about laptops though since we primarily don't use Dell laptops anymore and all our laptops are Windows based anyway (except for mine :).

    Not sure if you need company account or not, but it's highly likely.

  2. Re:Where are the numbers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    For digital cameras, home movies and publishing church newsletters Linux simply doesn't cut it.

    You don't use Linux, do you?

    The vast majority of digital cameras work fine with Linux. Even most of the ones (a dwindling number) that don't support the USB Mass Storage spec can be made to work through gPhoto.

    For home movies, I hear that Kino isn't bad. I do't make movies so I can't say much on this.

    As for newsletters, see below.


    Where's Linux equivalent of Microsoft Publisher?


    Scribus is much better than MS Publisher (which isn't hard, since Publisher is a piece of crap).


    Cool-looking Font CDs you buy at CompUSA for $5?


    Give me a break. X has supported TrueType fonts for ages. Just copy them across and you're done.


    Home design software?


    I don't know, but I suspect that there are far fewer users of such software than you may think.
  3. Some pre-installed linux boxes do encourage piracy by kbielefe · · Score: 3, Informative
    My Dad, knowing that I prefer to support family and friends' Linux boxes, and having had a good experience with his previous Mandrake system, bought a PC with Linux pre-installed.

    The modem and sound card didn't work out of the box and were one of the more difficult to get working with Linux, even for a Linux veteran like me. The resolution on the video card was also very low and difficult to fix. I ended up completely installing a new distribution.

    The PC came with a disk of windows drivers for its non-standard modem, sound card, and video card. You can't honestly say that vendor expected anyone to keep that Linux distro on their machine.

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  4. Simply not so by MichaelKaiserProScri · · Score: 3, Informative

    I just ordered a herd of Dell's. I could have ordered them with the following options: Windows 2003 Server, Redhat 9, no OS. Well guess what I did? The machines destined to run Windows were ordered with Windows. I considered ordering those machines without the OS, not because I was going to pirate it, but because I could buy Windows from CDW for $100 cheaper than Dell. I ultimately decided that $100 was a fair price to save the install time. On the Linux machines, I ordered those "No OS" because we use Debian, not Redhat, and Dell was charging $199 for Redhat!!!