Microsoft Bends To Norwegian Pressure 117
Martin writes "Microsoft has agreed to change the terms of its school agreement contract with Norwegian regional municipalities, following a complaint by Norwegian open-source software company Linpro to the Norwegian Competition Authority. Microsoft 'introduced two kinds of flexibility in the agreement, that were previously missing,' the head of the company's Norway operations said. One of these 'kinds of flexibility' involved Microsoft not getting paid a license fee for each Linux and Mac computer in schools."
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
OEM Inflation Reduction (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong
Re:I don't understand (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Buyer beware (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think they have that anymore to Dell... (Score:5, Insightful)
Though I am sure a lot of OEMs get the per machine treatment.
Re:Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
CAD and 3d applications require training, word processors do not.
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Schools (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, in many businesses employees are not selected on being computer literate. It is assumed that everyone can use a computer.
When Microsoft can twist the school system so that all young people are "Microsoft literate" instead of "computer literate", that has a very big effect on their future business and the viability of using alternative software.
Re:I don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been primarily using Linux for 9 years, but I personally have bought 2 copies of Windows at the store (one for my wife, one for me, in both cases because we had contract work that required it).
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand (Score:2, Insightful)
Search: Definition: "Low-hanging fruit"
A weasel thought occurrs (Score:1, Insightful)
You may actually get away with merely calling them different NAMES and not full companies...
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Wordpad (Score:3, Insightful)
Please do. Wordpad is a decent program, much better than MS Word, unless you need some of the feature bloat, in which case Worperfect is better.
Still I prefer Gedit for most things.
Such a deal! (Score:3, Insightful)
From now on, schools will only be licensed for PCs actually using Microsoft software,
And people wonder why I set up my latest business venture on a non-Microsoft platform. It's bad enough trying to deal with quarterly taxes, reporting, regulators...why would I want to add another profit leech to that mix?