The Niklas Lindblad Organisation

Recently, a fellow Linux-user started a small campaign targeting at getting a re-fund for his unused copy of Windows XP on his OEM computer. Of course this was not possible since he had agreed to the terms when he bought the machine and powered it on, and therefore could not hope to get his money back.

This resulted in a big discussion on whether you can buy a PC without getting Windows pre-installed at all. At least Acer did not seem to allow this, pointing out that selling PCs without an operating system violates against certain laws, but they could not give their customers an alternative either.

Many distributions out there seem to have already made huge efforts to make their software OEM-compatible. There is already a “OEM”-mode when you install Ubuntu, allowing both vendors and local computer retailers to ship their equipment with a pre-installed copy of Ubuntu on it. I have also seen fully deployable OEM-versions of SuSE Linux for Hewlett Packard machines.

And for all the people with the opinion that “Linux is too hard to use for the average user”. You have no idea what you are talking about, honestly, in most cases this is because: Linux on the desktop differs from what you might be used to (Windows), that’s all.

Not only is Linux on the desktop easy to use, it is also built on a reliable foundation because it is not a piece of software engineered by a company that solely focus on making money, it is a result of evolution. But maybe you (the “too hard” person) would prefer a world of monopolies, so that you would not be faced with alternatives and choices all the time?

But the problem still remains: there are no alternatives at all for the home users. It has been proven over and over again that what Microsoft does actually violates laws regarding market competition but yet there have been virtually no actions taken against this. The hardware vendors play a big role in this, they need to dare to give their customers alternatives, and deal with the dirty threats from Microsoft in court.

Wake up people. At least I personally am sick of living in a world with huge corporations marketing products that are useless compared to the alternatives. Microsoft has all the money any software vendor could ever wish for, still, they can not put together an operating system that does the job. Open source was, is, and always will be, the future.

And no, it is not communism, it is Darwinism.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 12:04 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.