No O/S as a right more than ever

[I. Khider]

Okay Ian, 

Let me rephrase the question to you and all TLUG members--what would
make me have a case?

-I-

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 16:54 -0700, Ian Petersen wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:36 PM, I. Khider <contact-uc+NVM1kvX9BDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > I thought this was the Linux users group! Surely my views are not
> > counterintuitive here.
> 
> You're missing the fact that this is a simple matter of supply and
> demand.  HP is offering you a machine with Windows pre-installed.  You
> can choose to take the offer and buy one or you can choose not to.  No
> one is cramming anything down your throat.  I agree that it's
> frustrating to have to pay for a license you're never going to use.
> I'd like to be able to buy a "naked" PC from any manufacturer I choose
> but no one has done anything wrong but not making such PCs available
> to me.  In my non-lawyer opinion, you don't have a case to present at
> small claims court precisely because no one has done anything wrong.
> 
> The advice you were given was to vote with your wallet and let HP know
> about it by writing a letter.  You can also work towards effecting
> change by spreading the word that HP won't sell you a Windows-free
> machine.  But HP is a corporation operating in a largely free
> market--their prime directive is profit-making and they're going to
> optimize towards making money.  Non-Windows users are apparently not a
> big-enough market for them to worry about.  The only way you're going
> to get anywhere with them is to convince someone important that
> non-Windows users _are_ a big-enough market to worry about.  That
> might be impossible because they get to decide how big is big enough
> and it might be that the current market is too small.
> 
> The people on this list probably all agree that it would be ideal to
> be able to buy an arbitrary machine with either Linux or no OS
> pre-installed.  The fact that you're being told not to go to small
> claims court and to quit whining is due to something else
> entirely--the realization that HP doesn't owe anything to anybody.  If
> the world changes and Linux users become the dominant laptop-buying
> consumer, HP will either adapt and start selling laptops with Linux or
> HP will get out of the laptop business.  In the time between now and
> then, HP has to decide for itself whether it makes financial sense to
> get into the business of selling laptops with Linux.  At this point,
> it seems they don't think it's worth the money.  You can try changing
> their collective mind but, AFAIK, you won't get very far suing them
> for having the "wrong" opinion.
> 
> Ian
> --
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