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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 canopic jug on Wednesday March 03 2021, @02:46PM (5 children)
"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.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 03 2021, @04:33PM (4 children)
Never had the pleasure of using CP/M, but I've heard a lot of glowing praise for it.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday March 04 2021, @07:19AM (2 children)
Emu8080: an HTML5 App to Emulate a Complete CP/M Machine [pagetable.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday March 04 2021, @07:40AM
The Wikipedia page gives a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M [wikipedia.org]
And for many CP/M resources: http://www.retrotechnology.com/dri/howto_cpm.html [retrotechnology.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 04 2021, @03:06PM
Cool. Though at this point I've been corrupted by GUIs and the Linux command line - I think I'm beyond properly appreciating consumer OSes of that era.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday March 04 2021, @07:47AM
Never had the pleasure of using CP/M, but I've heard a lot of glowing praise for it.
Praise for CP/M I'm not so sure about but its ubiquity might well be confused for popularity. Mostly it was just a means to run applications and very few noticed aside from the disk formats and capacities.
CP/M was remarkably similar to MS-DOS [wired.com], especially before DR-DOS. If I recall correctly the early versions of MS-DOS had only one small functional difference between it and CP/M.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.