[conspire] No more GNU HP Minis

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 08:52:39PM -0800:

> That seems utterly clueless about the nature of Microsoft Marketing's
> subsidy of OEM models with MS-Windows-with-other-code preloads, which
> allows the manufacturer to hit price point in a way otherwise not
> possible with the way the market it structured (and has been for a
> decade-plus).  Why would you think "things [are] really looking up" 
> when none of the fundamentals have changed?

There's no "crapware" for Linux, so if the
manufacturer is really getting tens of dollars to
put that on there...

  http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/01/8598.ars

...crapware revenue from _other_ software companies
plus the MSFT co-op marketing money has to cancel out
a big chunk of the cost of the OS license.  All of it,
for a crapware-laden box from a company that gets a
lot of co-op money?

The fun part is going to be when Google starts
offering (through the same hardware vendors)
its own Linux load that's tied to Google services.
They'll probably have to subsidize it with "marketing"
money the same way.  But when you buy a "Google Chrome
OS" machine and blow it away to put regular Linux on
there, at least you won't be paying the "tax."

-- 
Don Marti                                 +1 510-332-1587 mobile
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org