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rgacote | 4 years ago

Worked at an OEM and Microsoft charged a license fee for every processor out the door regardless of whether the system had DOS, Novell, or nothing at all installed.

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ginko|4 years ago

How can this be? How can they charge licensing for a device that doesn't contain any MS software?

przemub|4 years ago

They would force such a licence agreement on every OEM, small or large. There was a lot more dirty tricks involved to monopolize the market. Look up BeOS history, for example. The OEMs installed BeOS on a second partition, and they could not show it in the bootloader, because of these agreements.

Microsoft and Bill Gates built their position on pure evil.

0xcde4c3db|4 years ago

Because the reality is that the OEM doesn't want to track OS installations and Microsoft doesn't want to audit that tracking. With per-CPU licensing, the OEM can just say "here's our invoices from Intel".

bitwize|4 years ago

Because it was either agree to those terms, or don't license Windows -- by an enormous margin the most popular PC OS -- for OEM distribution at all.

krylon|4 years ago

Because they can. Or could anyway. I agree it's not fair. But money makes the world go 'round, as they say.

grishka|4 years ago

Why was this legal?

burnte|4 years ago

Eventually it wasn't under the antitrust settlement.