What is in the news today

Over on the register dot co dot UK (say it like it reads ;-)), they are talking about PC World a UK chain who sell computers. Well, one of their staff refused to repair a machine that that had GNU/Linux installed on it. Of course when contacted by the hacks (in the journalistic sense), from el reg the nice people in the Dixons HQ said they would fix it. However in my opinion they owe this person a lot more now.
The free advertising, the fact that we all now know Dixons will do their duty under the sale of goods act or whatever it is now called, is great for them. What about the core issue. The sad fact that people don't know about their options surprises me.

For instance I had dealings with a person this morning, a professional woman in her fifties I would guess. Well educated, and good at what she does I referred to the news as we heard it this morning. Microsoft had managed to be convicted by the European Court of First Instance, and the fines stood.
Cost wise that is not a big issue to Microsoft, no in fact every day they did not publish the specification that the court called upon them to do was another day that they managed to keep their customers though the methods of monopoly.

For a moment, let us also consider the damaging material that has come to light about their involvement, or to be more politically correct one of their staff whom they hinted was behaving in an ultra vires fashion. This person had put pressure on people to join the ISO standards bodies to swing a vote on OOXML to create a method for document presentation that would have allowed Microsoft defeat a standard that is already in existence by offering the ludicrous concept of "Competition in Standards". The whole idea of a standard is that you have something you can measure up against and it works. Round car wheels and square wheels come to mind.

What was really annoying about this is that there has been a standard in XML and documentation around for a while now. ODF is it's name. It is ISO approved and obviously sticking to standards was not the game of Bill and Steve.

As a friend of mine would say, "Gaaaaa it's just nuts!!".

Here you have the biggest company in the software world, doing things that are not software. They are debasing the marketplace by being a monopoly (convicted again, the first time was over the inclusion of the internet explorer with windows 95). Then they are doing things in many countries that adds up to an attempt to prevent competition by messing with the ISO and how it works.

As a result of the latter it appears that several senior people around the ISO are now looking at how their organisation works. It took a big company to corrupt their world view, of far from everything in the garden being rosy, the topsoil and drainage were in deep trouble, but work will begin to prevent that happening again.

So going forward what are your options if you are a consumer?

Microsoft will still be installed on a PC if you try to buy it from PC World or their ilk anywhere on planet earth. However you have a choice.
You can get a GNU/Linux system. More about your choices later!
Search for Debian, Ubuntu, gNewSense, Redhat, Mandriva, SuSE online. I'll discuss this in my next post.