Remember that lab I was building? I've been beating on my Dell sales rep to get me machines without Microsoft licenses. They don't offer Linux on an Optiplex GX260, but you can hound them for FreeDOS, which they announced last August and never bothered to market. I finally got the quote from my rep. It's for "GX260n" machines, where I presume the "n" suffix implies a lack of Microsoft.

Would you believe there was zero dollars change in the quoted price (WinXP Home vs. FreeDOS)? Do I need to alert the Slashdot weenies?

Hmmm, so it sounds like FreeDOS isn't all that free, huh...

RipoffDOS?

Yeah, why not?

<me ducks>

The way I understand it, Microsoft gets a portion of every machine sold, including those without Microsoft OSes installed. I believe that was the reason Red Hat on a Dell cost almost as much as XP/2000.

I suspect that the reason they're charging the same is due to the non-standardness of the order. Somebody has to go dust off the pile of FreeDOS disks, whereas Dell will give a deeper discount on a "standard" configuration. Still, you can kinda see Bill Gates grinning about all this.

This reminds me of that hoax I keep getting via email about a bill where the US postal service should get money for emails sent. The idea is that they should get money even when someone doesn't use their services.

Can't they just sell them with no OS at all ?

They used to call it the Microsoft tax, because the resellers license agreement is based on number of machines shipped, not how many were shipped with windows.
I don't even think that sort of agreement was banned in the monopoly case.
US law, the best money can buy.

Can't they just sell them with no OS at all ?

Here's a CNet article about this from last August. In summary:

- Microsoft's deal says that PC vendors must ship "an" operating system.

- Dell drops a FreeDOS CD in the box with the bare machine to satisfy Microsoft's terms.

What I've found out is that you pay exactly the same for WinXP Home or FreeDOS. That says that either there's a conspiracy going on here, or WinXP Home is so amazingly cheap for Dell that the incremental cost of shipping a "weird" machine blows away any savings from the Microsoft license.

the incremental cost of shipping a "weird" machine blows away any savings from the Microsoft license

But isn't that the job of "The Customizer"?

Is there a reason you _have_ to have a dell? There must to be other vendors willing to sell you a bunch of machines without the cost of windows. I bet your local white box builder would love your business too.

[He says as he types away on his dell xp pro machine at work...]

You know thay don't call him that.

I could definitely get cheaper white boxes, but I explicitly want small, quiet machines. I got quotes from two integrators (GamePC and somebody else) on Shuttle SB51G systems with roughly the same specs as the Dell boxes. They came out several hundred dollars more expensive each.

Dell gives you a quality piece of hardware for a great price. If they only weren't so deeply in bed with Microsoft, they'd be awesome...