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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."
Easy, offer a huge up-front discount to the schools and sneak it into the contract. People who think they're getting a deal of a lifetime tend not to look too closely at the fine print (gifthorses and all that).
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy). :)
It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong
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Because Dell's Ubuntu machines are slightly cheaper than their Window's equivalents, last I heard. I don't think they would do that if they still had to pay per machine.
Though I am sure a lot of OEMs get the per machine treatment.
That is the perfect explanation of the "Microsoft Tax." Someone should quote this on a regular basis when someone needs to explain to others what they mean by that.
It is the result of the neoconservative movement. Anyone who speaks out for consumer rights or against ruthless business practices is labeled as some kind of extreme left communist, and here in America, that is considered to be a bad thing. In fact, under the current administration, being labeled a "liberal" is a bad thing. And unfortunately, not only do consumers wind up losing, but engineers and programmers also end up losing because of software patents and large monopolies like Microsoft (God forbid we should ever say that a business is too big).
Palm trees and 8