Microsoft Told to Pay Tax on License Fee

MissingRainbow writes "To avoid paying taxes in India, Microsoft wanted a court to believe that it is selling its product and that there are no royalty payments involved. Their own EULA worked against them in this particular case however as it states, "the product is licensed, not sold". The court ruled against them."

Comments

Re:Obligatory

[Enderandrew]

HP is rolling out openSUSE on their computers I do believe. And WalMart has been selling Linux desktops.

WalMart is about as mainstream as you can get.

Re:dear god!

[calebt3]

Ok, unusable is the wrong word. Ugly fits better. At least I can submit a post without opening a new tab now. And one is forced to preview the post.

Re:dear god!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a good compromise would be to integrate the Reply to this/Parent links into the title/score bar, but align it to the right side. Oh, and for the love of god, don't make the buttons so huge that the bar gets bigger in height.

Re:Got Karma?

[timeOday]

Really? Is there any penalty here, or just back payments? If the latter, it's essentially just a failed gambit, no harm no foul.

Re:After Dark

[Paradise Pete]

What Vista needs is a "Flying Chairs" screensaver. Especially in light of the furniture that became airborne in Redmond at receipt of this news.

The amount they have to pay works out to about 28 hours of revenue.

No Tax on Income or Sales?

[GumphMaster]

The article implies that there neither sales tax nor company income tax (of the MS subsidiary/partner) exists in India. Is this the case? Is the tax on royalties the only tax income the Indian people get from software peddlers in India?

Tax makes EULA valid?

[Ciggy]

The only thing that slightly worries me about this: if the EULA is what is causing MS to pay the tax, then in paying the tax, MS can clearly say that the EULA is valid (in India at least) as the government has demanded legal taxes based on it.

Re:Tax makes EULA valid?

[Quattro Vezina]

The US does that too.

I once saw a PDF published by the IRS explaining how to report money from alternative income sources. There was a section on "bribes and kickbacks", a section on illegal drug sales, a section on "other illegal activities".

They just want your money; they don't care how you made it.

Re:HP and WalMart

[Bert64]

XP dies in June. Unless they extend it every last one of those boxes is going out the door with Intel's MobiLinux or a distro that supports that platform. Let's talk about BMW, where Linux comes standard with many models. They did extend it, there was a slashdot story about it very recently...
Amusingly, this means that users of these small laptops will end up with a system microsoft claim is inferior, and which they're trying hard to make sure new apps don't support... Conversely, apps will continue to support XP in order to run on these popular small laptops, leaving microsoft with even more fragmentation.

It's already annoying enough when "windows mobile" os so crippled and incompatible with other versions of "windows", sharing little more than the name. By contrast, i can recompile apps from my desktop linux system to run on my linux based nokia n800 tablet.