I think the car analogy is quite meaningless. The car manufacturers are entirely responsible for the car as a system and cannot sell it without stringent safety criteria being met. This would not be possible without them having control over the components and their integration into the whole system. There are bits they could leave out such as radios but not anything necesaary to drive the car.

The OS in a computer is more like the driver of the car. The car company is not responsible for how anyone drives, provided the car is designed in such a way to make it safe for suitable drivers (e.g. not children, or people who have some disability unless it has been modied). Computers can run perfectly well under many different operation systems provided they are built with the appropriate compatibility. The monopoly enjoyed by Microsoft prevents consumers choosing their OS of choice. For software that runs under Windows I prefer XP, but my laptop bundled with Windows 7 home edition cannot be "downgraded" to XP. This is quite wrong and trading standards organisations are wrong to let MS get away with their domination of the hardware manufacturers and retail distributer network.

Howard Lane
GreenNet

On 5/3/2013 14:51, Albert Dengg wrote:
hello,
On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 01:31:49AM +0100, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
...

 It is not about companies and marketplace. It is about consumers who
consider options that provide a good balance between quality and price
of the products they buy. Freedom to modify the product may be
considered by some, but still it is within some balance.

For example would you pay 100.000 euros for a car where you can replace
engine, lights, seats, cpu, software etc, or would you buy a 15000 mass
produced one? The example is exaggerated, but consider that even smaller
price differences, make a lot of impact to certain people.

I think your analogy is not entirely accurate:
the situation with cars is actually that they tend to include more and
more technology to actually prevent the customer from changing
anything...not because it is a technical requirement but to be able to
sell more expensive spare parts.

So in almost every example I can think of, if companies are forced with
legislation to break their products in multiple separate parts, prices
would go up in the average case, and go down in few (geeky) cases. Do
you really believe the average person is prepared to pay more for
something that has not any immediate impact visible to him (not everyone
is a mechanic or software developer). Most probably he'd just import his
product from a country where they don't have those laws.

well...how would it be more expensive for them?

we are actually not asking to support linux in particular (in the way
that you can call their support hotline and start asking questions on
running linux on their hardware), but only to leave out a non essential
part (like for example you would want to order your car withouth leather
seats because you want to use your custom velvet seat covers and
therefore have no use for the more expensive extra option of leather
seats).

yours,
albert



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