The Fellowship / Fellows / bernhardegger / Will the Windows tax be outlawed in France?

Will the Windows tax be outlawed in France?

Saturday 16 December 2006

Slashdot runs an interesting discussion on lawsuits by a French consumer group filed against Hewlett Packard (the leading company on selling computers worldwide), on the basis that forcing consumers who want to buy thing A (computers) also must buy thing B (Windows) is illegal in France.

While I fully support the lawsuits, there's some controversy about where to draw the line: is including a DVD drive in the computer also illegal, because some consumers might want to buy the computer without DVD drive? However, it doesn't seem to be too difficult for HP (and other vendors) to offer some basic choices: (a) No OS installed, (b) Windows installed, and preferably, but not necessarily also (c) - (x) your favorite OS installed.

Are there similar laws in other European countries? Depending on how the lawsuits will be decided, my next computer may be of French origin.

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Comments

yes, but

bernhardegger

Tuesday 19 December 2006

You're right that there are ways to avoid the Windows tax for desktop computers, you can even build them from scratch if you're so inclined. I haven't bought a big-brand computer myself so far, only from local/national shops, and it might have been bad luck, but every single shop where I bought a computer from went out of business. So maybe there's an advantage in buying from the main players, in that you can be fairly certain that the company still exists before your warranty expires.
One of the reasons that kept me from buying from HP, Dell, Gateway and the like was that they all force the Windows tax on me. I welcome an increase of my purchasing options, if the French lawsuits pass.

Also, the situation for buying laptop computers without Windows will dramatically improve. As pointed out in a previous article (https://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/bernhardegger/free_laptops_in_europe), getting a new subnotebook without Windows glued on it is next to impossible in Europe. If every vendor has to play fair in France, this will have a huge impact on subnotebook selections for me.

...until we can make it happen...

gerloff

Monday 18 December 2006

Until we find a way to abolish this nasty tax, I'd like to point out that in some situations there is a way to avoid paying for an OS you don't want or need: Buy your machine from a small local shop that puts them together from scratch. If you pick a good place, you get some control over the hardware that's in there and get it tailored to your needs. This can make things cheaper, too, since you don't pay for stuff you don't need.

As an added bonus, there's no hassle with call centres and helplines if anything goes wrong. Just pop by the store and chat about it. Having a guy (usually it's a guy) you trust with a screwdriver on hand is worth a hundred hotlines in a pinch.

But I'm quite satisfied with the desktop machine I got this way. Unfortunately, that's not really feasible for laptops. Meanwhile, Werner Heuser at http://xtops.de/ sells some mobile gear without OS or with pre-installed GNU/Linux.

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