Thursday, March 30, 2006

Windows Vista is threatened to be banned in EU

Digital Industri, a swedish news site, wrote yesterday that Microsoft is threatened to get Windows Vista banned in EU, if they don't obligate to follow the free competition rules . EU's open market commissioner Neelie Kroes wrote a formal letter to Microsoft, where he stated that the OS won't be accepted into EU if it doesn't include options to choose other software providers for the applications that's shipped with the OS.

For example, if you cannot uninstall Internet Explorer or the provided MS Antivirus, and replace them with Mozilla Firefox and Norton Antivirus, then it's obviously a act of preventing competition.

Personally, I think it would be the best thing that could happend if Windows Vista got banned. When I buy a OS, I wanted to be free to use it for whatever I want, not restricted by system barriers that Microsoft tries to fool us are in our best interest.

Windows Vista is shipped with Microsofts own Digital Rights Management software, that prevents anything that don't got the clearence code in the software, to not be able to run or install, successfully killing backwards compatibility with old hardware that don't have updated drivers.

Direct X 10 will also be Vista exclusive, meaning that we won't be able to play the games (DX10 games) we want on any other OS than Vista, not even Windows XP. Microsoft wants total control over your computer, something that atleast I feel it's the user who should have the control, and don't get a error like "Sorry, you cannot do that", because it doesn't follow Microsofts ideal of computing.

Hopefully, EU will actually do something more than just write them a "Angry, angry letter, telling you how very angry we are".

EU hotar förbjuda Vista

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