I can. If companies want to profit by being a middle-man between the OS developers and the consumer, then they also inherit the responsibility of actually dealing with said consumer. If Microsoft wants to be a pain in their arse and make it harder for them to actually fulfil their obligations as a merchant, maybe they should stop doing business deals with a company that's actively hostile to them.
It's the same thing as tech stores that try to foist you over the the hardware manufacturer if you buy a faulty component from them. You don't get to put your fingers in the pie and then claim that you have no responsibility to ensure the quality of an item you're advertising and selling.
You buy things from their website and pay using their payment platform. The website doesn't make it obvious that you're actually buying from a third party ("sold by: X" is in small letters and gets lost between all the other details). And Amazon lump items from different vendors together in the same product page.
I literally bought like 3 items on Amazon before realizing that not all items were sold by Amazon themselves.
When it turns out that items are counterfeit, they try to offload a great part of their responsibility onto the legal system, because they see themselves as the victims of counterfeit, not as facilitators [1]. Luckily, some judges are not buying their excuse [2].
(Even if buy items "sold by Amazon", you can get a counterfeit product [3].)
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-establi...
[2] https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/amazon-liable-for-defe...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276
But of course there’s no way Apple would take a return in store if I purchased via Amazon.
So I chatted an Amazon rep to see what the return policy would be for that item. She looked at the link and said “because this item is sold and shipped by Amazon, there’s a 30 day return period, and return shipping is covered.” I had the rep email me a chat transcript just in case her interpretation turned out to be wrong.
This system makes no sense to me. What does it mean when you see the “visit the Apple Store”? I thought this indicated that this was the seller?
I should note that I wouldn’t buy most Apple peripherals through Amazon, but I’m pretty sure no one is making knockoff Magic Keyboards just yet...
1: https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Keyboard-11-inch-iPad-Generatio...
That's a lie, but it is certainly a blurrier line than the one for traditional retailers. I don't think it's a coincidence that Amazon has been very slow to enter markets with strong consumer law like Australia.
I have always thought there is this underlying assumption that generally no person would ever purchase a computer that had no OS pre-installed. (Obviously that is not true, there are exceptions, e.g., pre-Microsoft and even today, with development boards.) If people were happy to install their own choice of OS (if there were choices), then could Microsoft have been so successful.
Computers have given rise to middleman-based businesses the likes of which have never been seen before.
What we are seeing with the internet perhaps mirrors the PC. As with the PC, where it was assumed that generally no person could do anything useful with "just a PC" without a pre-selected, pre-installed OS, there is an underlying assumption that generally no person could do anything useful with "just an internet connection" without a pre-selection of some certain "tech" companies.
It is nigh impossible to purchase computers and connect to the internet without the presence of middlemen and pre-made selections.
Who are you buying from? I get computers from Central Computer, which has five stores in Silicon Valley. They charge $30 extra to install Windows 10, $64 for Windows 10 Pro, and $0 for Linux.
They had plenty of experience doing similar things with MS-Dos; and they had a consent decree to tell them where the line was. (and I think they crossed the line again anyway)
I did just that, called MS and they had very politely asked me to f*ck off or contact the manufacturer again, the license was issued to the small family company where this was a very unnecessary expense (so there were no consumer protection laws applicable to this). In practice this is all empty promises, now I just furiously refuse to deal with Windows and Microsoft because of their dishonesty.
Remember, at one point they were considered a monopoly on PC operating systems. It is not like PC vendors had an option. Not signing on to the cartel was not an option.
> manufacturers typically say that they can't refund the windows license and tell the user to contact microsoft directly
won't fly anymore.
I don’t think this has ever been tested with respect to licenses though.
Microsoft was a monopoly, and was happy to abuse that position (see: United States v. Microsoft Corp.), OEMs had no choice.
Why would it be any different with Microsoft? I understand that it's "cooler" to storm the office of a big corporations, but it's really the middleman that need to take responsibility here.
Edit: I also still have my copy of the form letter that Microsoft handed out to us, which I transcribed at
First, it was sponsored by a VC-backed company (that had hired a documentary crew to capture their success, the ill-fated VA Linux Systems (which eventually became known as Geeknet) and the pretty poor propaganda documentary “Revolution OS” that managed to just sort of forget the whole dot com collapse thing)), so although I know the LUGs were part of it, this was a marketing event by a company looking to boost their IPO. I didn’t know any of that at the time, but looking back, it’s so clear this was just yet another VA Linux publicity event.
Second, to anyone who wasn’t part of the group “protesting” — that is, outsiders — all you see is a bunch of weirdos dressed up with picket signs outside a sales office (they didn’t even go to Redmond) to demand action, only to be greeted what seem to be very polite corporate people with a sign and lemonade.
Third, it fundamentally changed nothing. It took the DoJ agreements to lessen the hold Microsoft had one some OEMs, but it really took the proliferation of Chromebooks (which was predicated by the short-lived netbook era) for manufacturers to get cheaper deals on Windows licenses and to offer more customizations of OS choice at purchase. That still had zero impact on Linux on the desktop adoption rates.
And sure, most bigger OEMs if you buy direct will let you customize a machine with no OS and sometimes with Ubuntu, but the Ubuntu XPS 13 isn’t much cheaper than the Windows variant (max $50), you just get more of an assurance that there is some sort of driver support for your system (although usually not for stuff like fingerprint readers).
So like, all I remember is that 21 years ago, some angry nerds showed up to an office park parking lot, got some free lemonade, were told politely to leave, and then went home with their cardboard signs screaming victory. When they didn’t get a refund. Didn’t change OEM terms, and had zero impact on OS adoption. OS adoption changed over the years but it wasn’t because of anything any of the people in that movement did, it was because of Apple and Google.
1. VA didn't sponsor the event, but a chunk of the staff of the company's Sunnyvale HQ attended (and most of us were in the LUGs). VA didn't have any need at that stage to boost the IPO, as the fever was already brewing for companies like VA and Red Hat (both IPO'd that year, RH in August and VA in December).
2. VA didn't hire a camera crew either, but a friend of one of the executive staff (Jon Hall) wanted to do a story about Open Source, so Jon brought him in for a few days to do interviews and film around the office (do I think the exec staff saw the PR upside? Sure. If they hadn't they would have been foolish. But they weren't the primary driver). And IIRC, Rev OS forgot the dot com collapse because it was edited and released right before the collapse began.
3. Do I think the event was performative nonsense? Sure. I thought it was then too, much as I thought RMS was ludicrous and various other "open source luminaries" were a tad too close to 'hubris based lifeform' but the event, in the grand scheme of things, was an amusing, if ultimately pointless exercise. Not all things need to induce a sea change or have a deeper point than getting like minded folks to make a statement for its own sake.
For the first point, I appreciate your correction. Still, the official writeup mentions that VA paid to make the shirts. And as you say, a huge number of employees were part of it. I still contend that the publicity of the event was beneficial for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have had employees there and they wouldn’t have had the community in shirts they made. Red Hat didn’t IPO until August, so I’ll still say having activities like this get press attention (be it for Linux in general or VA specifically) was good for the VA Roadshow.
For number two, I’ve been told by numerous former VA people that Larry paid for the documentary to be made (at least until the collapse happened) and then the filmmaker basically ran out of money, which is why the fall of the stock was literally an on-screen card at the tail-end of the film. The film came out in 2001, though I’m sure he finished filming after the IPO,
For the third, I agree with you. You’re right, it doesn’t have to induce a sea change. And for its time, I can see how some would find it amusing (at 15, I very much rolled my eyes, but I can understand how people who were there would have had fun). My only point was to push back on what I perhaps wrongly expected the narrative on HN to be, which is reflexive hagiography that doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality then or now.
Jon "Maddog" Hall is an awesome guy, BTW. He used to be a constant presence at the Brazilian Free Software Forum (FISL). He's now the board chair of the LPI.
It was a lark. It certainly wasn't "sponsored". The dot com collapse was still to come. Nobody had any expectation of it changing anything, or getting refunds. At the time there was no possibility of getting an XPS13 with no OS, never mind with Linux supported. It got some attention for Linux, which practically nobody had ever heard of before they saw the picket signs. Linux didn't own server farms. There weren't server farms, unless you count racks of Sun pizza-boxes owned by whoever had software on running on them.
I guess you had to be there.
> Second, to anyone who wasn’t part of the group “protesting” — that is, outsiders — all you see is a bunch of weirdos dressed up with picket signs outside a sales office (they didn’t even go to Redmond) to demand action, only to be greeted what seem to be very polite corporate people with a sign and lemonade.
The photos shown on that page are very similar to that of the Magician guild on the Arrested Development show (https://i.imgur.com/eipugIu.jpg). It's uncanny, actually.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
If you look at their wikipedia article and see the photo of the rack mount servers they sold[1], that doesn't seem that ludicrous even today.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet#/media/File%3AServer...
:] you're a really funny guy :]
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/02/biztech/articles/1...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_279000/2799...
I guess that for younger people, it might be hard to remember the "good old time" when we were fighting for reimbursement of the license.
One time, I did the process to try to get reimbursed for one laptop in France.
At that time, there was a lot of uncertainty and no clearly defined process, but it was clear that the French law was on our side.
In the doubt, I did it all: registered letters to HP and to the retailer. I think that in theory it was supposed to be HP that should reimbursed me, but I think that they never replied to me.
On the other side, I received a reimbursement from the retailer in a kind of "nice unofficial way":
<< We think that we are not responsible to do that, but here is a 100 francs reimbursement so that you will stop annoying us>>
(So it was not really needed that I burned/shred my Windows license or anything else)
For a remote interview that I had a while back over Cisco WebEx, when things didn't work on my Fedora machine immediately, I'm glad I had my wife's XPS13 with Windows as stand by. Zero time wasted, worked immediately. If that didnt work, it would have been a phone call. I really wouldn't have wanted to muck around with some other distro at that point in time, even if I disagreed with the values of the software developers in question.
For those situations where someone emails me an Excel or Word file that they would like my edits in, and I'm simply not in the position to extoll the virtues of open formats or coach them in Markdown or LaTeX, I have a Windows VM and office.
I'm of a similar mindset and in my period of using Windows as a daily driver I concluded that neither Windows or Linux was that much more unstable but it is my tinkering that causes 99% of my own problems.
The last time I booted from a rescue cd or similar would be early 2000s. I certainly wouldn't be able to "get stuff done" in windows, wouldn't know where to begin.
The way Microsoft dealt with the whole thing though me that they don't really care about their EULA. It's not actually enforceable or relevant to their business. If it where, not paying the refund, or forcing the OEM to seems like a way to give anyone who truly wish to violate the EULA a legal entry point.
Still, the OEM licenses was/is not worth much, and most of us knew that. You could buy a Windows 98 license for something like $30, you just had to get it with a mouse, because then it would technically have been bought with hardware. Even if the mouse was only $10, you have to assume that the real OEM where getting even better deals.
Unfortunately laptops are a whole other problem. Sure there are a few laptops that you can get with Linux pre-installed. And a few more you can get without an OS installed, but the options are pretty limited. And building your own laptop from parts is a lot more difficult.
I think the situation is complex, perhaps Sony paid MS for Windows (XP mediacenter), but they made money on the Norton Trial software, the trailer for movies on my desktop, and ah lot of other cruft that was not really in my interest.
"...manufacturers would truely refund people..."
Buying a PC without Windows meant buying parts and assembling it yourself. Wasn't too difficult, but you were SOL if you wanted a laptop.
Right about that time period, copy protection of the Windows CD's was altering the equation.
Just for balance, what Apple computers or Chromebooks are available without an os?
1. Make Windows ignore autorun.ini on writable media. -- When a user double-clicks on a drive that has a hidden autorun.ini file, Windows executes the binary referenced in the file. This is how most Windows viruses spread.
2. Disable automatic execution of scripts in Microsoft Office documents. -- Microsoft Office supported normal documents (DOC & XLS) and template files that can contain scripts (DOT & XLT). One could rename a .DOT file to a .DOC and MS Word would open like a .DOC file, and then silently execute the macros contained in it. This is how most Microsoft Office viruses spread. Since most users never use macros, Microsoft could have easily disabled the function by default and provided a config option to enable it. Additionally, Office could refuse to open template files that have a non-template file extension. And finally, it could prompt or simply refuse to execute macros from removable media.
3. Require PC makers to turn off the floppy boot option on new PCs. -- Nearly all PCs were sold with their BIOS settings configured to automatically boot from the floppy drive if one is present and has the right boot data on it. If someone turned their computer on while an infected floppy was in the drive, their computer would get the virus. Microsoft could have easily required PC makers to turn off the floppy boot option on new PCs. This would make the computers start up faster and stop an entire class of viruses. Microsoft could have gone further and made Windows refuse to start after booting from a floppy. Users would quickly develop the habit of removing floppies before turning on their computers.
But Microsoft made a lot of extra money because of viruses. When a person's computer got viruses, it would slow down or corrupt files. Many folks would go out and buy a new computer, paying for new licenses of Windows and Office.
Viruses harmed so many businesses in the developing world, keeping poor countries poor. I lived in Ghana when I was a teenager. I did some PC technician work and saw the impact of Microsoft viruses first-hand.
Microsoft really cheated the World out of a lot of economic growth and quality of life.
The IT media (PC Magazine, PC World, etc) turned a blind eye to it. They didn't have the integrity to go against their big ad buyers, the anti-virus companies. Nobody with an audience would hold Microsoft accountable.
Back then it was Microsoft; now it's Google & Facebook. Companies continue to exploit because US social structure has not progressed.
Wasn't this fixed in XP SP1? You got a OS prompt asking which action you wanted to take when you inserted removable media.
I wish getting an ANSI keyboard were that easy around here (Ireland)
[0] - https://www.dell.com/de-ch/work/shop/notebooks/neu-xps-15/sp...
[1] - https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/laptop-computers-for-bu...
(edited for formatting of references)
No thanks to Microsoft, but a lot has changed.
Drivers are much better now and many large companies supply their own drivers (though frustratingly often as binaries).
Some companies like Dell offer Linux specific SKUs with somewhat tuned drivers.
There are companies making Linux first desktops. Linux first servers are extremely common. There is a lot of hardware not just shipping with Linux but designed for Linux first.
It's a world better now than it was in the mid-late 90s.
Some like Lenovo were giving customers very hard time in getting a refund. And only very recently they started offering Linux preinstalled on some of their models for regular users.
Some things like you mentioned above are of course much better today. But Windows tax situation is still a mess.
