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Microsoft Bends To Norwegian Pressure
Martin writes "Microsoft has agreed to change the terms of its school agreement contract with Norwegian regional municipalities, following a complaint by Norwegian open-source software company Linpro to the Norwegian Competition Authority. Microsoft 'introduced two kinds of flexibility in the agreement, that were previously missing,' the head of the company's Norway operations said. One of these 'kinds of flexibility' involved Microsoft not getting paid a license fee for each Linux and Mac computer in schools."
It's not a fee for distributing OS/X; it's a fee per machine.
The usual licensing terms that Microsoft force on OEMs are that Microsoft must be paid a fee per machine sold, regardless of whether it has Windows installed on it or not. Of course the idea of this is to encourage OEMs to install Windows on every machine they sell, because they can't make a saving from not doing so. If you try to negotiate a "per copy of Windows" price instead of a "per machine" price, the licensing cost goes up to the retail cost, which is deliberately inflated to make it uneconomic.
Enemies of the US are for instance:4 456801,00.html
NATO Allies:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_fire
Industrial competitors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon
and Linux using flag burning commies that are trampling on the constitution of course...
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/31975.html
Heh. Even after two previews. Since our justice department is NOT bought, like yours.
Microsoft has been specifically forbidden in the U.S. for doing per machine sold licenses as a result of losing one of the antitrust cases. I'm not sure about the bundling B.S..
No, it has an impact on the opinion of those students about software. When I started working at Red Hat, the "non-technical" employees were given a brief, 2 hour tutorial in how to use GNOME and OOo. They must be doing all right, because as far as I know they are still employed. The reason is simple: schools don't teach people the details of how to use office suites. In high school, such things were not considered relevant to the curriculum, and in college, such things were expected to have been learned in high school. Microsoft knows that it is just a question of exposure, and the way people think about their computer. How often do you hear the word "powerpoint" used as a synonym for "presentation" or "slideshow?" I've heard people refer to a presentation created in OOo, in OpenDocument format, refer to it as a "powerpoint."
Very few people even know how to use the features of MS Office that would necessitate some level of retraining in OOo. Very people even need those features -- most people just use a word processor (I know, everyone is queuing up the, "you obviously haven't been in the workplace very" comments, to which I reply: you obviously haven't been outside your line of work much) and a presentation creator. Spreadsheets are about the only thing where the incompatibility becomes noticeable, and even then, a 10 minute tutorial on where each button is would suffice for most people. The fact of the matter is, most people are not power users, and this is no more true today than it was 30 years ago. Most people just don't know about the powerful features their software offers them.
Palm trees and 8
There's no "sneaking" involved. It's clearly stated. EVERY machine you have MUST be counted when calculating the license fee.
No matter what runs on that machine.
Or how old it is.
Or what it does.
If you do not want to go with the Microsoft contract, you may purchase retail versions of Windows for each machine. And hope that you're fully compliant. Because the fines for piracy are far more than the cost of just paying Microsoft for every single box you have no matter what.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.