Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@attbi.com>]

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:

> Or, tell me what the store sales
> guy is going to sell?  No difference in answer!  At BEST,
> you _might_ get a choice if you shop at Walmart, where
> Linux/Lindows are offered.
> 
> Unless your grandmother/mother had a life in IT, or enjoyed
> it as a hobby, I can only see one "real choice" emerging
> as an answer.
> 
> That says to me "monopoly".

More to the point, assume that your grandmother does know what an OS is, 
and intends to download Red Hat from the net for her new computer. 
Unless she puts the system together from parts, the probability that she 
won't end up paying the Microsoft tax is zero.

That more than any other issue is why Microsoft has a monopoly.  They 
offer the system builders a deal, either $X per system if you sell boxes 
without a Microsoft OS, or $Y per system if you sell every "desktop" or 
laptop computer with Windows.  And X >> Y, so that to be competitive, 
they have to sell you a Microsoft OS whether you want it or not.

They do the same thing with corporate licenses.  A company can pay 
Microsoft several million dollars for a Microsoft site license, but it 
will still require that the company pay for Windows with each new 
PC--whether or not it ever runs Windows.

Is this legal?  Not really.  But Microsoft points out that if you do 
things this way you don't have to worry about lawsuits if the SPA 
conducts an audit.  Of course, Microsoft is not going to send their tame 
dogs, the SPA after you unless you fail to sign their agreement, but if 
they do, the cost of the audit can be more than the cost of a Microsoft 
site license, and the site license is not cheap.  (Of course, my 
experience may be colored by being responsible for PCs in classified 
labs, and containing classified data or connected to classified 
networks.  I had a big box of (shrink wrapped and unopened) copies of 
Windows NT and Windows 2000, with each marked with the system name, just 
in case.

Oh, and to be honest, there were two other companies, both database 
vendors, whose site license polices were painful to comply with.  Oracle 
finally changed their policy to one that was much easier to administer, 
and the other, I won't even mention the name because their policy wasn't 
really designed to deal with classified software issues.  With Oracle we 
actually worked with Oracle to write an auditing tool and got its future 
results written into the site license.  (The Oracle auditing tool 
technically underreported the liability.  But as I said, it took awhile 
for Oracle to finally officially realize that if their database couldn't 
track it, they probably shouldn't ask compensation for it.  But as I 
said, they were willing to write the results of the auditing tool into 
their contract, so we didn't have to worry.)

-- 
                                              Robert I. Eachus

"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure." -- Jacques Chirac, 
President of France
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." -- Rush Limbaugh