Dell Will Offer XP Past Cutoff Date

Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, brings news that Dell will be offering Windows XP pre-installed on their computers past the June 30 cut-off date. Computers purchased with Vista Business or Vista Ultimate past June 30 will come with a copy of XP Pro. Dell plans to simply install that copy upon request to save users a step. Perhaps this will help Microsoft officials make up their minds about another extension.

Comments

Submitter diversity

[peipas]

I couldn't help but notice that the submitter, a commercial entity, currently has four articles on the front page.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[electrosoccertux]

At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions? ?
XP has support into 2014. Wiki.

XP MCE Anyone

[Nom du Keyboard]

For the home user XP MCE is a far better deal cost-wise. It gives the most important feature of multi-processor support, while dropping the ability to join an Active Directory domain. A very fair trade-off for the home user.

So is Dell offering MCE as well still?

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Selling a computer with XP past the Microsoft cutoff date is pretty irresponsible. At least Ubuntu has community support, whereas XP will have no support? Is it really Dell's place to oversee microsoft's business decisions? Why, because that is what the customer wants? We have already moved our purchasing to used retailers in expectance of this day. We have no plans on installing Vista, and as much as I would love it, Linux is not a viable option at this time.

I applaude this decision and will do my best to support them if they continue selling XP. Microsoft has stated XP will be technically supported until 2014.

Re:Activation?

[lazy-ninja]

The cut off date is for OEM Sales ONLY. The OS is still live and active. Mainstream support through 2009 and extended/limited support through 2014.

Re:Outlook? You must be crazy.

[willyhill]

I guess I am. And taking my offtopic mods while I'm at it :)

Mactrope (clever play on Macthorpe)
gnutoo
inTheLoo
Erris (oldest one)
willeyhill (the joke's on me)
westbake (clever play on westlake).

Hard to keep up.

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[Kalriath]

No they can't. The license under which Windows source is provided to the mega-companies and governments that get it is for internal use only. If Dell were to actually distribute any source or object code from that to their customers, Microsoft would crush them like a bug.

Re:If they won't sell it, we'll steal it.

[mr_matticus]

It seems that he is confusing Trademark law with Copyright law. It is my understanding that if a company does not use a trademark, they can lose the rights to it. Abandonment of a copyright is not simply "not using it to sell copies" or "not making commercial use of their copyrighted work". Today, parties all but have to declare that they abandon their copyright in order for it to be so.

Trademarks are slightly different, but you have not framed the issue in the correct manner. It's not the non-use of a trademark that itself causes problems, but rather the failure to defend against others making use of it. You can sit on an unused trademark (say, the "Fairlane" name for Ford) if you might have use for it in the future or if it's a temporary gap in use (like when they retired the "Taurus" name for several years). As long as you prevent someone else from using it, it's not considered abandoned. Like copyright, abandonment is more than not using it. But abandonment and losing rights for failure to prosecute ("dilution") are distinct.

"Abandonware" still protected by copyright remains so. If you own a license already, the law allows you to take some otherwise unlawful means to continue using it once it has been abandoned by the manufacturer, but it does not allow you to sell or distribute it simply because the original company no longer chooses to.

The only place the law is really grey is if the company no longer exists AND no one purchased or was assigned the rights. There hasn't been an affirmative ruling on that to my knowledge, but there's a strong case that the copyright has lapsed if the holder and their estate/successor no longer exist.

Reading the Fine Print

[brainee28]

I read about this on Dell's website, and if you read the fine print, Dell will install the image for you, but if you need to reinstall from the XP disk they provide you, they won't support what you installed, only what they installed. Only the pre-installed image at the factory can be supported. However they will support Vista fully if you upgrade. This is a sneaky way of making XP fans happy, but giving them a time limit.

The way this works...

[Barny]

For those wondering :)

If you buy Vista Business or Ultimate, you have the option to upgrade to XP Pro or Windows 2000 instead, this only requires you to have a single license install media for the older OS but it doesn't have to be unique.

So dell simply brought a 1 user mass license for XP and give it out with that nifty "pre activated" thing, to everyone who gets vista business.

This process was explained to me by a MS OEM sales rep, sounds stupid imho, why not just keep selling XP?

Re:Ubuntu Instead?

[tknd]

The grand parent wasn't saying that was how he decided, but rather that is how companies decide. I agree with what you're trying to say, it is stupid for a company to buy into a worthless support contract because legally the software vendor is not responsible for any problems that occur or are they even responsible for providing a solution. Support contracts are basically there so you have a number to call and whine to when shit hits the fan, and when your boss comes around and asks "why isn't it working," you can say, "well it's proprietary software vendor's X's fault." Which sounds a little better than "it broke."

I know how useless support contracts are because we just canceled one. We had an annual "support" contract with an old and dying vendor with some old and dying software. One day we decided to actually talk to them to see if they could fix our issue. And their answer was "pay us more money and we *might* fix it." We replied "nevermind." A month later I figured out what the issue was after dumping their junk software into a test environment and playing with the inputs we had access to. Eventually I found that it had a shitty algorithm for doing something stupid and we happen to have data that ran into the algorithm's worst case run-time. Altered how the data was being fed and the problem went away. I saved the company ten's of thousands of dollars that day.

Next when it came time to renew our annual support contract with this vendor, we decided to not renew it because not only did we know they were trying to leech huge amounts of money from us, but we also had plans to eventually retire the aging system. Bam, thousands of dollars saved for the company again.

Don't think that MS is the only "bad guy" when it comes to "support" contracts. Every big software vendor does it and everyone makes sure to cover their butts. If you honestly think you can save your company a lot of money just by terminating support contracts and ensuring that you can take the responsibility for supporting the software then by all means do it. But there are some support contracts that I think are stupid, but others that I think are essential. The easy way to figure that out is if the system fails, and you can't bring it back up in a reliable amount of time, then you probably shouldn't take that responsibility because you'll probably lose your job.