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| Authored by: tiger99 on Tuesday, December 04 2012 @ 10:23 AM EST |
Well, I don't hold out any hope at all of the FTC doing anything soon. The EU
likely will, but that may result in different hardware being sold, officially at
least, on each side of the pond. It could be that grey market imports to the US
would run into trouble with DMCA or similar. In the long term that could be
good, because if there were sufficient complaints that US citizens could not get
access to what was legal in most of the world, something would eventually have
to be done. That situation exists already if you want to play a DVD on a Linux
box. Eventually things must reach breaking point, and hopefully there will be a
full overhaul of the law, including getting rid of software patents and a few
other things, once the extent of the damage they are causing is fully
understood. But all of this may have to wait until those pulling the strings
behind the scenes have become irrelevant. M$ is already on the way....[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: mcinsand on Tuesday, December 04 2012 @ 12:53 PM EST |
I will try to refrain from quoting too much, but there is an article that is a
must-read especially in light of the UEFI hijinks and, particularly, for those
that think that a company has to have a monopoly or even a majority market share
for antitrust to kick in. The article is TYING ARRANGEMENTS AND THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY.
For those
that are unfamiliar with the Data General versus Digidyne case, the first line
of the article sums it up quite well; "in the recent case of Digidyne Corp. v.
Data General Corp., the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
held that Data General's refusal to license its copyrighted computer software to
those who did not purchase its hardware was an unlawful tying arrangement."
In
essence, DG would only provide RDOS with the purchase of a Nova minicomputer,
and Digidyne wanted to use RDOS for its hardware. Digidyne and some other
companies filed suit and won, on the grounds that "Data General's market power
in the market for the tying product-computer software-was sufficient to
establish a per se violation of section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act." DG did
not have a monopoly. In fact, to use another quote from the article, "Data
General is one of approximately one hundred manufacturers of general-purpose
minicomputers and microprocessors."
UEFI is an attempt to let the market
continue to break prohibitions against product tying, and we in the FOSS world
are rightfully concerned. To take the new Surface tablet, for example, the way
I read this article, we should be able to buy the hardware without having to pay
for Windows 8, particularly since there is already a Windows 8 product on the
market for sale.
The principles laid out sound like good measures for making
monopolies more difficult to construct. If a company makes hardware and OS,
they can sell both on the shelf, but they also need to provide both as
separately available items... if that company has enough market presence to have
any influence on the market. If the company has significant presence, then the
requirement to offer individual as well as combined components protects the
competitive environment where other companies can combine and repackage for
their own deals. For example, my local shop will put together the hardware that
I want, and they will let me specify the OS, including Windows, Fedora, or
Ubuntu.
Before it comes up, Psystar doesn't count. As PJ pointed out at the
time, Psystar violated copyright by diddling with OSX' code. Had they pursued
antitrust, though, they could have had a chance.
Regards,
mc[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, December 04 2012 @ 04:11 PM EST |
I apolgize for not putting much effort into answering my own question but is it
the hard drive that is locked into M$ or the BIOS? In other words, is
replacing the hard drive a work around?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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