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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: 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]

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  • (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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