First official reply from the European Commission ref. complaint on illegal forced selling of Windows

simo simo.sorce at xsec.it
Tue Jul 4 18:54:13 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 19:26 +0200, Marc SCHAEFER wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 10:29:31PM +0200, Laurent GUERBY wrote:
> > Just packaging with an easy way for the vendor to remove the Microsoft
> 
> How are vendors testing their hardware before shipping to customers ?  I
> am afraid most of them don't do like SGI was doing in Cortaillod, that
> is using specific test programs they then released as GPL (memtest86
> comes to mind).

If I remember correctly, Dell in order to avoid paying MS used a version
of FreeDOS to test machines. Now they have a complete CD set that run an
automated series of tests (on server platforms) where it is not clear
what's the underlying OS (but it does not seem to be MS based).

> They probably load a recent Microsoft Windows OS, the recommended
> driver, and run a few test programs.

Does it really matter?

> This means that removing Microsoft Windows might cost them money!

I do not think they use the final OS that get installed anyway so if
they use something from MS I think they have a separate agreement for
that.

Simo.




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