Re: [Fsfe-uk] OFT visit

[ian]

On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 22:03, Robin Green wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 08:13:40PM +0100, Andrew Atkinson wrote:
> > Nothing to do
> > with the fact schools have to licence all 586 type machines and above
> > whatever they run.
> 
> Did you bring this up with the OFT? What argument does MS use to justify this
> bizarre "someone else's hardware licensing" scheme?

Their standard line appears to be that it makes administration simpler.
Why it is significantly more difficult to count machines running Windows
than it is to count every pentium + Mac is beyond me. Would a reasonable
person think the prime reason was to be simpler or to shut out
competition. That is the crux.

I have also pointed out that *any* bulk licensing could be unlawful if
its effect is to block out the competition. This is more likely to be
deemed the case if the supplier is a monopoly with more than 40% of the
market. I have pointed out to the OFT that the NHS deal where the NHS
paid M$ 70 million centrally, effectively shuts out competition forever
because the only way to get something like GNU/Linux in is a bit at a
time and that would only be likely to happen with individual health
trusts, hospitals or surgeries. MS licenses are now effectively free as
far as these are concerned but paid for centrally at large cost to the
tax payer. No chance of change unless the entire service does it in one
go which is unlikely.

Still one step at a time. The specifics of the MSSA are fairly
indefensible I think. Campus agreement for colleges is based on users so
why is MSSA different. Logically if the grounds for MSSA were simplicity
why not do the same for Campus agreement of vice versa?


> > (This is also one mistake: OFT asks for Macs, 286,386,486
> > or Pentium, and a curious category called workstation. So where do I put
> > celeron and AMD etc)
> 
> Celeron's and AMDs would both be Pentium-class, as they are instruction-level
> compatible with Pentiums (IIRC).

Yes that's what it says in MSSA.

-- 
ian <address@hidden>