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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
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday March 03 2021, @01:36AM (1 child)
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.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 03 2021, @06:07PM
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.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.