Could there be a law to protect the free choice of operating system?

[Albert Dengg]

hello,
On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 01:31:49AM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
...
>  It is not about companies and marketplace. It is about consumers who
> consider options that provide a good balance between quality and price
> of the products they buy. Freedom to modify the product may be
> considered by some, but still it is within some balance.
> 
> For example would you pay 100.000 euros for a car where you can replace
> engine, lights, seats, cpu, software etc, or would you buy a 15000 mass
> produced one? The example is exaggerated, but consider that even smaller
> price differences, make a lot of impact to certain people.
I think your analogy is not entirely accurate:
the situation with cars is actually that they tend to include more and
more technology to actually prevent the customer from changing
anything...not because it is a technical requirement but to be able to
sell more expensive spare parts.
> 
> So in almost every example I can think of, if companies are forced with
> legislation to break their products in multiple separate parts, prices
> would go up in the average case, and go down in few (geeky) cases. Do
> you really believe the average person is prepared to pay more for
> something that has not any immediate impact visible to him (not everyone
> is a mechanic or software developer). Most probably he'd just import his
> product from a country where they don't have those laws.
well...how would it be more expensive for them?

we are actually not asking to support linux in particular (in the way
that you can call their support hotline and start asking questions on
running linux on their hardware), but only to leave out a non essential
part (like for example you would want to order your car withouth leather
seats because you want to use your custom velvet seat covers and
therefore have no use for the more expensive extra option of leather
seats).

yours,
albert
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