Lenovo halts online sales of Linux-based PCs (ComputerWorld)

Posted Sep 12, 2008 14:02 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

The price of a laptop has become even more unrelated to actual component costs in the UK now. I don't know if this phenomenon is happening elsewhere.

Yes it is. Even before 3G, retailers have offered ADSL-based broadband packages with subsidised hardware, just like you see with mobile phones. In Norway, and maybe in other countries, it is now mandatory for retailers to state the full cost of the acquisition: the hardware plus the contract fees for the minimum contract period.

Of course, we hear about how the Windows tax is offset by promotional bundling and that if you want GNU/Linux instead of Windows, the promotional stuff won't be bundled and hence the subsidy isn't there, and so the price may even go up if the subsidy covers more than just the Windows licence. However, none of this is reflected in any quoted price, leading to questions about price transparency and the legality of the bundling practices concerned: you certainly don't know what you are paying for.

In addition, the vendor is actually forcing you not just to license the operating system but also to license all the "promoware" - this seems like a somewhat undesirable practice, since when that Windows desktop appears, I doubt that you get much of a say about which of this stuff you don't want to be running. I note that Best Buy charge $30 or so to remove such "promoware" which I presume is a service fee, but one has to wonder what the manufacturer would charge in order to be "compensated" for the lack of revenue in you refusing to look at such stuff.

What Lenovo is doing here is to force anyone who doesn't want to license Windows to not agree to the EULA (if you even get the choice to review it) and then to seek a refund, to which Lenovo will most likely respond that the customer doesn't have a choice in the matter, or that because of agreements between Lenovo and other vendors, there's no money in the pot to be claimed back. If the "promoware" vendors are subsidising the hardware, it's unethical that you as a third party should have obligations to them: if you wipe their stuff, do they have the right to ask you for some of their money back? What kind of bizarre contractual relationship masquerading as a straightforward purchase have you just entered into?

If the various regulatory authorities had any backbone, they'd have stopped these smoke-and-mirror games a long time ago instead of pandering to the likes of Apple and Real Networks and chasing Microsoft round over various side issues.