Re: [school-discuss] Oregon legislator on Microsoft lobbyingagainst open source

[ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>]

On Sun, 2003-05-18 at 07:58, Frederick Noronha (FN) wrote:

> 
> Phil was the sponsor of the Open Source bill here this year.
> 
> fred

Take a look at Microsoft Schools Agreement. Here in the UK it requires
schools to pay annual license fees for every Pentium PC so if we as a
company install Linux based machines with no MS software the school
still has to pay Microsoft. This seems very likely to be in
contravention of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the Competition Act here so
made a complaint to the Office of Fair Trading and after a few months of
gathering information they have decided to proceed with a full
investigation

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-5-664844,00.html

It might well be that such licensing also contravenes anti-trust laws in
your state so it might well be worth checking out.

Hope this helps.

BTW, if a company is found to be breaking the law in this manner here,
it can be fined up to 10% of its entire UK turnover. Also the UK law is
based on European Union law so if guilty in the UK, its likely that they
would be guilty in every member state in the European Union. Also the EU
is about to report on a completely separate anti-competition issue
related to media player in the next few months. On reading the relevant
law, I think there are probably many other contraventions of different
aspects so if one fails there are plenty more to try. Its also likely
that software patent legislation likely to be adopted in Europe will
come into conflict with aspects of fair trading law. Looks like the
lawyers could get rich at the expense of big corporates and the
Government but it does provide an avenue of attack for small companies,
organisations and individuals without the necessary funding for
lawsuits.

Don't get angry, get even ;-)

-- 
ian <ian.lynch2@ntlworld.com>