[plug] HP to ship the NX5000 (laptop) with SUSE pre-installed.

[Craig Ringer]

Senectus . wrote:
>>What is "dos tax" ? I know hard drive can be bundled with OEM windows, but
>>that was never forced. Was it?
> 
> Once apon a time it was not legal for a hard drive manufacturer to
> ship a hard drive without an OS on it.

Presumably, it was not legal in the sense that shipping drives without 
an OS would've violated an agreement with Microsoft (perhaps the one 
that permitted them to ship drives with preconfigured Windows installs 
for OEMs?). It seems unlikely that shipping a hard disk without an OS 
would've been directly prohibited by law.

> Back then the cheapest and best known OS was MSDOS.
> EVERY hard drive in the world was sold with a copy of MSDOS on it and
> a tithe paid to MS.

Is it possible that they were required to ship a /Microsoft/ OS on all 
disks, and chose the cheapest /Microsoft/ OS? Otherwise, I'm sure IBM 
would've licensed OS/2 _very_ cheaply to get that sort of volume, or 
heck they could probably have included CP/M.

I have a vague impression that the 'dos tax' issue was resolved as a 
part of, or in the lead-up to, the US DOJ v Microsoft anti-trust case.

--
Craig Ringer