[Sussex] Window's Refunds

[Geoffrey Teale]

Richie Jarvis wrote:
> Very interesting - I recently purchased some machines from Dell for 
> Linux installations - the best I could achieve was to have Windows XP 
> Home on the system at a saving of £30.  They refused to supply the 
> systems without an OS, as Microsoft didn't allow it!

Yup, the OEM license agreement that Dell have with Micrsoft prohibits 
them from selling certain lines without Windows licenses.  This doesn't 
seem to be the case for "workstation" and "server" class systems (I 
bough a dual Xeon workstation from Dell two years ago now and it came 
with Red Hat 8 preinstalled), but most laptops and non-Xeon desktops 
seem to be stricken with this problem.

As Angelo mentioned the best answer is to go with a vendor who will ship 
Linux or OS free.  That's quite hard though when you need 40 identical 
laptops with well defined hardware for a given date.

--
Geoff Teale
Free Software Foundation <tealeg at member.fsf.org>