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posted by martyb on Tuesday March 02 2021, @05:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the windows-refund dept.

The Free Software Foundation Europe(FSFE) (no connections to the Free Software Foundation(FSF), despite the name) has logged a win in Italy in court for the freedom to choose the operating system on new computers. Luca Bonissi won after two years of court battles. He won the first round in a kind of small claims court, but Lenovo responded by lawyering up and attacking. The court eventually rejected all of Lenovos argument, confirming that the right to reimbursment for pre-installed software is due. Further, an additional 20k EUR in damages were awarded to Bonissi.

In a historic judgment in Italy, in a case initiated by FSFE supporter Luca Bonissi, Lenovo was ordered to pay 20,000 euros in damages for abusive behaviour in denying to refund the price of a pre-installed Windows licence. In a motivating gesture for the Free Software cause, Luca donated 15,000 euros to the FSFE.

[...] It should go without saying that everyone should be able to freely choose the operating system to run on their personal computers. Free Software is about granting the liberty for people to freely run software they desire and, consequently, decline the software not respecting their freedom. But Microsoft and the vast majority of hardware manufacturers dishonour this principle by dictating which operating system their customers must use, forcing them to run Windows even when they simply do not want to.

See also the FSFE Windows Refund Guide and the Racketware Guide about how to avoid the Windows Tax.

Previously:
(2014) Windows Tax now Illegal in Italy


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday March 02 2021, @07:58PM (23 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @07:58PM (#1119009) Journal

    Don't get me wrong. I don't think you should have to pay for Windows if you don't want it--but I think that regulation should have been established beforehand . . .

    Here is the problem.

    Back in the 1980's . . . The IBM PC came with two OS options.
    1. PC DOS (licensed to IBM from Microsoft)
    2. UCSD p-System (yes, that is an actual operating system that is bootable, has applications, utilities, compilers, etc)

    Then there were PC clones.

    Slight digression here . . .
    Bill Gates had the vision to realize that PCs similar to the IBM PC would emerge and Microsoft could sell into this market of similar devices. (It was probably a dream come true when clean-room work exactly alike machines like Compaq were created.) Of course IBM thought the value was in the hardware, not the software. Also Steve Jobs had a famous quote: the software tail that wags the hardware dog, in response to how VisiCalc on Apple II caused people to demand Apple IIs over other machines at one point in time. When Bill Gates was trying to sell his BASIC to Altair he argued that without my software your computer is just a box with blinking lights.

    Here is the crux of the problem:
    Microsoft decided to license MS-DOS to PC clone manufacturers in a fashion that required the OEM to pay for an MS-DOS license for EVERY machine the OEM sold, whether or not it shipped with MS-DOS. So while there were superior alternatives to MS-DOS, (and I would say p-System was superior, and there are others too that weren't offered by IBM), if you bought a PC, you were already paying for MS-DOS plus whatever it cost to buy the OS you really wanted. So no matter what OS you wanted, Microsoft's cash register would ring with every PC sale.

    By about 1999/2000 then the DOJ finally decided to sue Microsoft for antitrust (but over Internet Explorer), it was already way too little and too late. (and don't get me started about how Microsoft stole Spyglass and named it Internet Explorer)

    Now raise your hand if you remember any PC operating systems other than MS-DOS that were available for PC compatibles in the 1980s? Raise your hand if you even remember the p-System? Raise your hand if you can name any other OS that existed for PC compatibles? Any? Yeah, they all were swept into the distbin of history despite MS-DOS being the worst of all possible choices. But the monopoly paid for the development of MS-DOS 2, and then 3, and by that time it was too late. By 4.0 it was "the dos ain't done until Lotus won't run", etc.

    This is all before the 1990s and the wreckage of many destroyed companies in the wake of Microsoft's abusive behavior. If you build something cool, Microsoft is either going to buy it for pennies on the dollar, or if you won't sell, they'll steal your ideas and build their own and crush you, or they'll find a competitor of yours and buy them and then crush you. And that is how it was. It is why today you know about Forethought's Power Point and have never heard of Aldus Persuasion.

    Yeah, I'm getting too old and cranky.

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  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:29PM (12 children)

    by istartedi (123) on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:29PM (#1119025) Journal

    Yeah, I'm aware of most of that history but it doesn't answer my question. Aside from that, the answer to the "microsoft tax" was to simply not pay it, write your own operating system, and vertically integrate the hardware and software. There was a little ol' "fruit company" that did that, and I think it worked out well for them.

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:50PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:50PM (#1119032) Journal

      Apple was already building PCs before the IBM PC came along. Microsoft was in business at the point in time (1977) when the holy trinity (Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore PET) came along. Microsoft was a nice friendly company that didn't seem evil. They even sold a version of Adventure that was ported to PCs. (prior to IBM PC)

      Apple was already developing Lisa (predecessor to Mac) at the time IBM PC was in development (and thus MS-DOS was in development).

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:52PM (7 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:52PM (#1119033) Journal

      You've got your timing a bit off. Apple was competing against Altair, the S100 computers, etc. MSDos was later. IBM didn't come out with the first IBMPC until Apple was already at (past?) the Apple ][+.

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      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:56PM (2 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:56PM (#1119035) Journal

        Altair was 1975. And other homebrew computers in this time. Apple II was 1977 and announced in BYTE magazine. IBM PC was 1981.

        MS-DOS (rather PC-DOS) was simultaneous with IBM PC in 1981.

        I think I have the time line right, and there are years of BYTE Magazine to corroborate. Also in 1977 was the same year of the TRS-80 and Commodore PET. The PET was prior to the Vic or C64.

        Does all that jive with how you remember it?

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 03 2021, @01:36AM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 03 2021, @01:36AM (#1119223) Journal

          Yes. That sounds right. So when Apple was building their system, it wasn't competing with MS/PC-DOS. (Actually, IIRC, the IBMPC came out around the time of the Apple III. A really inferior thing to compete against.)

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          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 03 2021, @06:07PM

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 03 2021, @06:07PM (#1119519) Journal

            At the time, we were developing using the UCSD p-System. (on Apple systems rebranded Apple Pascal)

            At one point, our product ran on four different machines, which was amazing at the time:
            1. Apple II
            2. Apple ///
            3. IBM PC
            4. Corvus Concept (raise your hand if you've ever used that one)

            The non-Apple systems used the UCSD p-System version IV, but Apple had forked Apple Pascal from UCSD p-System version II. So we didn't have binary compatibility, but did have source code compatibility. We had to compile two different versions of our binary. A version II for items 1 & 2 above, and a version IV for items 3 an 4 above. This is because the p-Code object code had changed format and improved opcodes between version II and IV.

            I used an Apple /// for a couple of years. We generally liked it much better than the IBM PC. It wasn't the hardware, but the OS that we liked. The SOS operating system on Apple /// was way better than the standard p-System on IBM PC. So we did source code development on Apple ///, and then did the compile step on IBM PC to service items 3 and 4 on the above list.

            We had a Corvus Constellation network and hard drives. This allowed all our workstations of various kinds to share the same disk space on the server. (at this time server meant a "disk block" server NOT a "file" server as today)

            Those were fun days.

            On IBM PC it became harder to sell installing the p-System as the OS. Even if we set it up with dual partitions and the ability to dual boot.

            Along came this product from a Canadian company Datalex called the Datalex Bubble. It encapsulated the entire p-System within an MS-DOS executable. Now our program looked like an MS-DOS program that could be installed on a standard PC. The underlying "weird" p-System OS was hidden (mostly) from view.

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      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:57PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:57PM (#1119037) Journal

        Oh, I see who you replied to.

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      • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday March 02 2021, @09:09PM (2 children)

        by istartedi (123) on Tuesday March 02 2021, @09:09PM (#1119043) Journal

        Apple at its inception was competing against those companies. That's just one point in time.

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        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 03 2021, @04:29PM (1 child)

          by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 03 2021, @04:29PM (#1119475)

          There was some overlap, but Apple DOS was at the end of its life while MS-DOS was in its infancy.

          Apple DOS first came out in 1978, with the final version 3.3 released in 1980
          Microsoft PC-DOS first came out in Aug. 1981, and MS-DOS 3.31 came out in 1987

          Meanwhile, Apple had pivoted away from Apple-DOS to release Macintosh System Software v1.0 in 1984 (eventually renamed Mac OS)

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS [wikipedia.org]
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_systems [wikipedia.org]

          • (Score: 1) by istartedi on Wednesday March 03 2021, @10:50PM

            by istartedi (123) on Wednesday March 03 2021, @10:50PM (#1119627) Journal

            Sigh... inception is one point in time, and the DOSs are one class of OS. The context for this discussion is not just a DOS tax, but also a WINDOWS tax, so I thought it was plainly implied that we were talking about the companies and their OSs in general, not just the DOS era.

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:52PM (2 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 02 2021, @08:52PM (#1119034) Journal

      and I think it worked out well for them.

      So many people bought in to the MS-DOS and PC-compatible world who didn't take Apple seriously. Periodically it would be heard in the industry by people who probably just hated Apple for some reason, that Apple would go bankrupt. Yeah, Apple was the company that was going to go bankrupt every single year since 1981.

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      • (Score: 2) by stormreaver on Thursday March 04 2021, @01:11AM (1 child)

        by stormreaver (5101) on Thursday March 04 2021, @01:11AM (#1119661)

        Yeah, Apple was the company that was going to go bankrupt every single year since 1981.

        In 1997, Apple was seriously staring down bankruptcy. The filing was imminent until Bill Gates saved Apple with a $150M contribution to Apple that he probably hoped was going to ward off the DoJ.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 04 2021, @04:16PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 04 2021, @04:16PM (#1119879) Journal

          That is very true.

          Apple management didn't believe their own Power PC story. They continued to not make enough new Power PC models and make too many 68K models -- the ones nobody wanted to buy new any more. They suddenly had $1 Billion in inventory nobody wanted to buy.

          Totally stupid move. Totally the fault of management.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday March 02 2021, @09:36PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday March 02 2021, @09:36PM (#1119053)

    Now raise your hand if you remember any PC operating systems other than MS-DOS that were available for PC compatibles in the 1980s? Raise your hand if you even remember the p-System? Raise your hand if you can name any other OS that existed for PC compatibles? Any?

    I don't have three hands.

    You mentioned the UCSD p-System (which I used), but there was also CP/M-86 (which I haven't used, although one of my colleagues used it on an ACT Apricot [wikipedia.org]), Xenix (which I have not used), 386/ix, Digital Research's Concurrent DOS (which I have used with the GEM interface). I'm certain there are more that could be found by using the Internet search engine of your choice, but the above is from memory.

    Yes, I am an old fart.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03 2021, @01:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03 2021, @01:32AM (#1119218)

    Raise your hand if you even remember the p-System?

    Not just remember, but actually used. My fourth language was Pascal, specifically UCSD Pascal (the p-System) on Apple II's in my high-school computer class. Of course, after having taught myself Atari Basic and then 6502 assembly before taking the class, the high-school Apple BASIC class (prereq to the Pascal class) and the Pascal class were breezes. Fifteen minutes to complete the lessons that were due two days from now, two and three quarter class hours to play video games on those same Apple II's.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by aim on Wednesday March 03 2021, @08:14AM

    by aim (6322) on Wednesday March 03 2021, @08:14AM (#1119339)

    You missed DR DOS (MS was quite rightly vilified for making their software deliberatly incompatible with DR DOS) and OS/2 (yes, it started in the 80ies). Novell Netware ran on PC hardware. SCO Unix started 1989.

    Going up to the 90ies, one could add GEOS, BeOS and some other Unix variants (notably BSDs and of course, Linux). IIRC even NeXTStep ran on x86. Ah, Plan9 and Inferno, too...

    Yes, I'm an old fart, too.

  • (Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Wednesday March 03 2021, @12:50PM (6 children)

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Wednesday March 03 2021, @12:50PM (#1119379)

    Now raise your hand if you remember any PC operating systems other than MS-DOS that were available for PC compatibles in the 1980s?

    Minix [wikipedia.org] was around and was targeted to IBM-PCs.

    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday March 03 2021, @02:46PM (5 children)

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 03 2021, @02:46PM (#1119425) Journal

      "Minix was around and was targeted to IBM-PCs."

      Minix is still around [minix3.org] and has been under continuous development. It's not widely used unless you count the Intel Managment Engines [soylentnews.org], which may catually make it the most widely used OS out there. Curiously Minix moved to the NetBSD user space [soylentnews.org].

      But in the 1980s, until near the end of the decade, the microcomputers were nearly all CP/M of some kind or another except for those which were AppleDOS.

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 03 2021, @04:33PM (4 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 03 2021, @04:33PM (#1119476)

        Never had the pleasure of using CP/M, but I've heard a lot of glowing praise for it.