In essence, much of the licensing is so blatantly geared to exploiting the customer its surprising that there isn't more of a fuss. Its down to ignorance in the end. Look at the recent publicity about "rip off" Britain where cars are a bit more expensive here than in other countries. Now look at the variation in price of software depending on whether its OEM, a boxed copy or Multiple license pack or Education or Agreement or Select, upgrade, competitive upgrade, client access licenses etc etc. Same bit of software in many cases, vastly different prices to different groups. This causes a great deal of confusion so people get the details wrong - not just end-users, some representatives of the software vendors don't even understand it! Also some cases eg running Windows on say a thin client under VMWare are difficult to know whether they conform to any of the manufacturer's rules. Since you can only buy Windows as OEM or boxed copy for a single piece of hardware how can you run it on a thin client where the number of users varies and it isn't actually on their machine? Under normal circumstances it would be reasonable to just say don't buy the product, but this isn't normal circumstances because there is a monopoly that is holding everyone to ransom. Easiest way round it is to keep accelerating the use of Linux simply because then you don't have to worry. With Compaq laying off 8500 worldwide seems that the PC building is likely to be slowing which means fewer operating systems so I expect more rather than less pressure on software protection. If this raises the inconvenience level to end users beyond the level of tolerance, so much the better in the long run. -- IanL

Damian COUNSELL http://www.icr.ac.uk/cmb/bioinformatics/ CMB Bioinformatics phone: +44 020 7352 8133 x5226 Institute of Cancer Research direct: +44 020 7878 3850 London SW3 6JB fax: +44 020 7351 3325