Hi from sunny Brussels,
I hope that we will be able to come up with an initiative tackling this problem pretty soon. cheers JJ
JJ,
Have you ever done anything 'legal'. By that I mean trying to get free legal/lobbying help from an organization with partially similar aims. For instance, there's Clifford Chance (a lawyer's company that represents people like Novell, Red Hat, IBM etc in their fight against MS).
Here's an interview with Thomas Vinje, the guy who heads up the cases for Clifford Chance:
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2006/gb20060313_174820.htm
I know these people are money-minded. Also due to them representing the corporate side, they ignore normal consumers, hence concentrate on 'silly' things like the MS media player bundling story (due to their clients). But I'm sure they would see the relevance of ensuring either 1) an effective Windows refund policy at all outlets 2) the right NOT to pay for/install Windows.
To quote CONFIDENTIALLY a friend:
I don't think 'my' lawyers do anything for free, though they do
take note. Apparently we've had a few e-mails to info@e-c-i-s.org (http://www.e-c-i-s.org/) from consumers regarding complaints, some of which were of note (i.e. 'we didn't think of that' or 'that's an interesting angle@)...>>>>
We don't have money for these lawyers, but we do have a network of fairly like-minded consumers. We could also - via free software developers and communities - try and motivate some of the clients such as Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva etc behind competition lawyers.
Also we have ideas that they cannot think of because they are trapped in a proprietary mode of thinking. For instance, if consumers (that basically means Linux users/groups) survey the possibilities of buying a notebook without Windows at major retail outlets in their EU Member State, then we would have fairly concrete 'evidence' of systematic market distortion and lack of choice.
Therefore, I think they can escape the request to not preinstall, but they can't escape the request to allow refund. Refusing to refund the OS license should be banned by antitrust rules, IMHO -- and, at least in Italy, they refuse refunding whenever someone tries that path.
Apparently the lawyer Carlo Piana (of Studio Legale Tamos Piana & Partners) is helping the Italian consumers' organization prepare a complaint regarding the lack of choice when buying a computer (ie. forced sale of Windows MS) and the lack of a refund policy despite the EULA.
Belgium's consumer organization also considered it, but I'm not sure if they did that seriously.
We could also try and motivate the European consumers organization (BEUC) to move. These people have lawyers...
How does FSF Europe work? I'm new only having started using Linux last year (because it has support for Welsh and I lost my MS reinstall disks).
Best rgds