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Julian Hall wrote: > > All they need is a friendly rack of software with a big 'Operating > Systems' placard above it, and someone on the till with the brains to > ask every customer going out with a PC - 'Did you buy your OS?' Of > course Microsoft won't want Vista on a shelf at £150 next to for example > Suse Professional, which last time I looked in PC World was going for > £89.99. It will show up how much M$ are overcharging for their > bloatware. That's without even mentioning the free distros, which could > be at the POS. Unbundling misses the point. It isn't the bundling. It is the OEM work that makes Windows work. Note that even where DELL and HP have shipped Linux on Laptops, they have done shoddy jobs by most reports on the OEM work. Certainly even buying Redhat preinstalled servers at ZyNet (when we still did Redhat everywhere for Linux), the bundled kernel wasn't adequate to drive the included DELL RAID hardware (it worked but at the speed of a dead sloth, software RAID 5 would have been much faster). Quick hacking around, some info from DELL, some patching and firmware updates and it went fine, but anyone (including DELL's Linux team!!!!) benchmarking it out of the box would have found Windows was many times faster than Redhat on the same hardware. Doesn't matter how you package it at sale if the options aren't comparable, or even available, it won't sell. I mean at the moment most manufacturers would just ship their Windows recovery disk as the media, meet the unbundling requirement, and there it would end. Sure unbundling might be part of a solution, but you can't buck the market, the solution to breaking the monopoly has to address the root cause, which is lack of demand for the alternatives. Here fines against Microsoft may have more effect than unbundling as it pushes the price up. OEM windows isn't 150GBP, because the manufacturer provides support, and media etc. Indeed almost no one pays list price, that is just psychology to make you feel it is worth a lot, and that you got a good deal when you paid a fraction of that. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html