On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Scott Courtney wrote:
<soapbox> My solution to the Microsoft Monopoly doesn't involve breaking up the company, nor even forbidding preloads. I simply want to require the following:
1. Any sale of an operating system must be shown as a separate invoice line item, even if the operating system is bundled with a hardware product.
2. The customer must have the option to purchase the hardware without any operating system, and must receive a discount equal to the standard invoice amount for that operating system.
3. To discourage computer makers from simply pricing the operating system at some ridiculous value such as $1, thereby making it not worth anyone's time to decline its purchase, they must be required to *also* offer unlimited copies of the same operating system for sale separately, at the same price, to anyone who cares to buy it.
4. Any contract clause which would prevent a computer maker from complying with the preceding is nullified by the court.
I would add one other point: A manufacturer of computer hardware should sell a product which is not dependent on any particular OS for its operation. This includes any configuration or diagnostic utilities which are necessary to utilize the product fully. I'm currently trying to set up a microsoft-free Dell laptop. The bios on this laptop supports a suspend-to-disk function, but the utility to format the S2D partition runs only under DOS, and the S2D function itself depends on the 'standard' MSDOS boot loader residing in the MBR. I'm lucky - this laptop came with the partition already formatted, and I can use dd to make a bit-image copy of it, just in case I sometime have to format another HDD. The S2D function works on the principle of marking the S2D partition as 'active', and expecting the boot loader to boot whatever partition is 'active'. Does anyone know, or is willing to write, a GPL'd boot loader that will simply look for the 'active' partition and branch to the boot record of that partition? -- Rick Green "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin