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Neil Williams wrote: | On Friday 10 December 2004 9:40 am, Rob Beard wrote: | |>It isn't illegal to sell 'blank' systems. This is just a Microsoft thing, | | "The Redmond Tax". | |>they want every PC to be sold with a licence, I think Dell got round this |>by installing MS-DOS on their servers or something.
DELL ship blank servers, but I think some suppliers ship FreeDOS to meet the terms of their Microsoft agreement.
| But the user is still paying for that licence in the total cost of the | machine. That's what MS want - they don't care what happens after the vendor | has bought yet another licence on your behalf.
Microsoft wanted that vendors paid for Windows for every box, but their licencing terms were rules anticompetitive, so they opted to make the discount if every machine came with an OS (any OS).
| Currently, one option is to buy a Mac. OK, it's an Apple Tax but it's far less | irksome to support a proprietary company that in turn supports the free | software community. That's why my most recent machine is an iBook.
You can buy blank machines still, but generally not from the big vendors. I bought a low end DELL server, which is slightly overengineered as a desktop, but a pleasure to work with half decent PC hardware, and ships without an OS.
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