Slashdot Mirror
Lenovo Ordered To Refund 'Microsoft Tax'
angry tapir writes with an excerpt from an article over at TechWorld: "A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn't want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want, according to French campaign group No More Racketware."
If a company wishes to not sell specific configurations of their products no one should force them. If that means they lose sales as a result of it, thats their problem. If it turns out another company (such as Microsoft) is forcing itself on the market in an anti-competitive way then it is that company that should be taken to court.
Does this say anything for buyers outside Europe? I bought a Lenovo laptop and tried to get them to refund the Windows license I was not planning to use and they said they can't do that.
Lenovo does not have a free choice. They can either refuse Microsoft's thuggish demands (do not sell linux or we will cut off all supplies of Windows to you), or they can give in to Microsoft's thuggish demands. They have no power.
They can't take Microsoft to court.
Now, the consumer can't take Microsoft to court either. Why? They have no standing to bring a case - Microsoft did not bully or threaten the consumer, it bullied and threatened Lenovo.
IE, even though Microsoft is distorting the free market, they could never get sued.
You might say that the government should sue them... ha ha ha ah ha. The same governments that just bailed out Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Deutschebank, Credit Suisse, UBS, RBS, etc, when they all blatantly broke the law? When the regulators that work for the government get payed huge salaries to to join industry as soon as they 'retire' from government service? When campaign contributions are now completely unlimited and these companies can give a billion dollars to someone to be president?
>Like it or not, the software bundled with your computer drives its cost down
Maybe the crapware from Norton, McAfee, etc, but not the Windows license.
Microsoft gets its pound of flesh every time. The Windows license is always a cost, unless you can prove otherwise.
--
BMO
You've missed the point - the issue is not the cost to the consumer. It is that there are consumers that do not wish to subsidize Microsoft, no matter whether the money is coming from their own pocket or from some parasitic software company. Do you think after all his time in court that the French laptop buyer actually made a profit on this whole affair? The whole point is for consumers to fight back against the abuse of monopoly positions.
And you notice that Lenovo does not reveal to the court the actual cost of the licence? They might well have trouble explaining the difference between this cost ("peanuts") and the amount that is being charged for separate licences.
One of the ploys that car makers are doing now is designing their crap radios into the system so that if you put an after-market radio into the car, it won't start or the headlights won't work, or various other things - not to mention that the dashboard doesn't allow an aftermarket radio to fit into the space so their designers can have fun styling the dashboard.
Both 'issues' that the car makers are presenting can be solved by a simple, existing technical solution - a standard radio front panel interface that includes additional connections for car functions - in fact many/most modern cars are already using CANBUS, so they would only have to support a CANBUS interface to the radio, and the radio makers would have to provide a set of common commands (like an API, only message passing interface). The radio makers probably already do that, since car makers don't build radios. So if I want to put in an aftermarket sound system, I would just have to open the dash, unplug the existing POS radio and insert my new hotness (and maybe add speakers, etc.)
IMHO this could be a candidate for antitrust, as the car makers are locking third party companies out of an effective monopoly with this action. It's a very similar situation to the original Carterfone decision, which opened the telephone system to third party equipment.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
MANDATORY: On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:a) It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. b) If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system will be operating in Setup Mode with Secure Boot turned off. c) The firmware setup shall indicate if Secure Boot is turned on, and if it is operated in Standard or Custom Mode. The firmware setup must provide an option to return from Custom to Standard Mode which restores the factory defaults.