The Open Sourcerer

Taxing Times for Free Choice [Updated]

It seems, unfortunately, as though my experience with Amazon was not common place.

Neil Wilson left a comment this morning explaining that his request to Amazon did not meet with the same response as my own…

We are not in a position to offer a partial refund for this product. You can of course return the laptop to us for a full refund if you wish

This appears to be in breach of consumer protection law and, more to the point Microsoft’s own EULA which, if you read it, and then decide to not accept it, clearly states:

“If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE, and you should promptly contact Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund in accordance with Manufacturer’s return policies.”

Some may try and suggest that “product(s)” means the computer in question, but since when have Microsoft started licensing the computer hardware of unknown manufacturers? The EULA is written for the protection of their software, not for some arbitrary computer of which they have little or no knowledge.

Amazon – This is not good. You really do need to do the right thing. I am sure that if you ask Asus, AIUI, or whoever else supplies your computers they will be able to reclaim the License cost from Microsoft and pass it back to you.

Unfortunately, it seems as though Amazon are not the only ones trying to ignore consumers and force us to pay for software we have no need of, nor desire for. Enter Ebuyer (a UK based “stack ‘em high, sell em cheap” etailler)…

Here’s a potential customer’s question being answered this morning by Ebuyer’s E-Note system (E-Notes are Ebuyer’s way to avoid having to provide telephone numbers or email address so you can talk to real people)

Dear x,

Thank you for your response.

I have been speaking to the Product Managers for the Software and Laptops and they have both advised that we would not issue a refund on the OS.

You may return the product for a refund if you are within the time period of 28days after purchase but other then that we are not going to be issuing a refund on the OS.

The Product Manager for the laptops has been speaking to the manufacture and they have come back with the below response regarding the matter:

‘It’s a load of rubbish, I don’t know where this rumor has come from J we started getting people asking for it on the EEE PC when we first produced the XP versions.

We get the odd person phoning up saying this to us but no one gives the cost of XP back and I can understand why they think we would.

I’m sorry we cannot help — I have never heard of any manufacture or reseller giving the money back.’

Kind Regards,

y

Ebuyer Customer Support Team

Dear oh dear Ebuyer…

What a very strangely worded response. The internet is quite awash with people who have successfully claimed a refund for the Windows Tax. Please see this page for a consolidated list of many.

Asus, of whom the above message is referring are not doing themselves any favours by locking themselves into only supplying Microsoft’s Operating System. See this public letter regarding one buyer’s thoughts on the subject.

I would also like to bring to the attention of all vendors what the National Consumer Council, here in the UK, thought about EULAs in February 2008.

The National Consumer Council (NCC) has accused 17 firms, including Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec, of using unfair “end user licence agreements” (EULAs).

The NCC has asked the Office of Fair Trading to launch an investigation.

The NCC said the firms’ EULAs were misleading customers into “signing away legal rights”.

The NCC looked at 25 software packages and said that in 17 instances, the packaging did not tell potential buyers they would have to sign an EULA in order to use it.

While some contained the EULA inside an instruction manual, or let it be read online, this was only after the software had been bought.

“This means that consumers are unable to make informed decisions before they buy a product, yet are being forced to take on an unknown level of legal responsibility,” said the NCC.

After examining the contents of the EULAs, the NCC also said that some contained potentially unfair clauses.

Unfortunately, on the 1st October 2008 the Welsh, Scottish and National Consumer Councils merged with Postwatch and energywatch to form Consumer Focus. And did they maintain a historical record of the old sites? Not that I could find.

Anyway, it boils down to this:

Perhaps these vendors need to read about the Sale of Goods Act again.

Neil Wilson described the situation very succinctly in an earlier comment on the same original post.

It is much better that the retail store pays, because they are the ones that are ultimately the channel to market. The more expensive it is for a retailer to stock Microsoft the better.

If the retailer is awkward, then the way to a refund is avoid the trap of following the instructions in the EULA. Instead you request that the retailer replace the software with a version that isn’t ‘faulty’ (ie doesn’t have the additional terms and conditions imposed). You didn’t agree to them when you purchased the item and therefore they don’t form part of the contract of sale with the retailer.

The Sale and Supply of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002 requires that the retailer replace the faulty item, or if that is impossible provide you with a refund. The Sale of Goods Act gives you the right to partially reject items. Essentially you assert your ’statutory rights’.

I feel that we need to have a bit of a campaign here… Can I request that all readers of this post, especially in the UK, please pass it on, tell others and if you have the time, please write to your MP to make your opinion heard. It is disgraceful that we should be FORCED to pay for software for which we have no need nor desire. Microsoft seem to have successfully closed down many of the earlier Linux bundled netbooks through downright bribery or co-coercion I assume. It is not right.

This is the 21st century, there are other operating systems available which are superior in almost every way and, even better, are free. Just go and download Ubuntu if you don’t believe me and try it out for a few weeks…

[UPDATE]
Neil left a comment below. But just to make sure it doesn’t get overlooked he wrote:

Can I ask that all readers contact the OFT and request that they investigate the use of bundled software EULAs as an unfair practise under the new Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.

Thanks Neil, I’ll do that shortly. Sounds like a good idea.
[/UPDATE]

NB: There is a small but growing band of niche retailers and vendors who will sell you a computer with no operating system pre-installed. The choice is quite limited and the major manufactures seem incapable of escaping the grasp of Microsoft. But if you care to, do visit Naked Computers to see if there is a vendor that can help you.

Amazon’s Windows Refund Helps the Earth

On the 21st July 2009 I reported how Amazon had made it really easy for me to reclaim the cost of the Windows XP license on a new Asus netbook. This was a very popular post for my humble blog; especially after appearing on Slashdot thanks to reader and Digital Tipping Point producer Christian Einfeldt.

As a quick digression, I decided to install the 3rd Alpha release of the forthcoming Ubuntu Karmic Koala (what will be 9.10) on my netbook and it is working very nicely. I have discovered one problem with my 3G modem (an Option iCON 225), but this is alpha software and helping to test and find bugs is what it’s all about. I’ve confirmed the bug on Launchpad and will hopefully be able to help diagnose and rectify the issue as the Karmic release progresses.

Back to the topic.

What perhaps wasn’t as clear as it could have been (apparent by some of the dodgy reporting elsewhere) was that the netbook was a prize I’d won for helping to get testers to a Beta trial of the Micromiser energy saving software, specifically written for Linux, by a company called Miserware. As I hadn’t bought it the first place the refund was sent back to Miserware, not to me. That was absolutely fine. It was the principle I was interested in, not really so much about the money. I had thought that should the refund come to me, I would donate it to a deserving (IMHO) FOSS project. I hadn’t decided on any one particular project though as I was doubtful I would get the cash anyway. But that was my basic idea.

When the refund went off to Miserware, I mailed them to let them know it was coming and why. I also mentioned that I had intended to donate the refund and that it might be an idea for them to consider too. A couple of days later they emailed me back to ask if I’d mind them donating it to something a bit different. Not a free software project but something more in keeping with their “green” credentials. Hey! It’s their money; who am I to dictate what they do with it?

I thought it would be good to show you where the Microsoft Tax has gone:

Dear Melissa,

Thank you.

Your support will help the Sierra Club continue its efforts to protect wild places and endangered species, confront global environmental challenges, and keep the pressure on politicians and corporations.

By supporting the Sierra Club online, you also become a member of the Club’s Online Community — helping to save paper and postage and enabling you to get the latest environmental news and information quickly. As a member of our Online Community you can help protect the environment by visiting the Sierra Club Action Center and sending personalized emails to key decision makers on important conservation issues. And, at our Online Member Center, you can subscribe to one of the Club’s email newsletters and electronic publications.

The Sierra Club has been devoted to protecting our natural heritage for over 100 years. And thanks to your support, we can continue to fight and protect our natural resources.

Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Carl Pope
Executive Director
Sierra Club

Please print or save this message for your personal records.

Name: Melissa Cameron
Amount: $67.58
Designation: Donation to the Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is:

America’s oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization. Inspired by nature, we are 1.3 million of your friends and neighbors, working together to protect our communities and the planet.

I think that’s really cool. From over here in Europe, the USA isn’t exactly perceived as having a strong track record on green issues, although I’m sure that is going to change with the Bush era finally behind us. But nevertheless, it is great to see that there are organisations in the US that exist and promote the environmental agenda. If you’re a concerned American please go and stop by The Sierra Club and say hi… For all of us.

Windows is Dead (almost). Long Live Free & Open Source Software, i.e. Ubuntu

Finally.

My wife’s PC was the last bastion of proprietary software hell remaining in our home (and we have quite a few PCs). 2 days ago, Helen explained that she’d been having a nightmare with Windows. You’d start to login and immediately it would log you out again! Nice. And there was no easy way to prevent it. “Safe Mode” did the same thing. Very helpful – not. Googling threw up a lot of people with the same experience and some rather dodgy sounding workarounds to rectify the situation.

Helen has had a dual boot setup for a while, has been getting used to the nuances of Ubuntu and the Gnome desktop and is now fairly comfortable with it. So, rather than trying to fix an inherently broken OS we decided to make the switch. There was one caveat however; iTunes. Her work is a franchised music therapy business for elderly and disabled residential care homes. She uses a big iPod and iTunes to manage her many playlists etc., and all the music is in Apple’s lossless proprietary format. (I know, but I didn’t have an opportunity to suggest an alternative at the time…)

To make the move to Ubuntu as painless as possible I bought some more RAM and a 320GB HDD from Scan Computers to give her some more space and also just in case I ended up needing to do a fresh Windows install for a dual-boot setup. But my plan was to first of all attempt to use VirtualBox for the iTunes requirement. Unfortunately Wine didn’t seem like a viable option at this time.

After what seems like far too much effort, the iTunes Library is now hosted on our home server so it can be backed up easily. A VirtualBox (the closed source PUEL edition for USB passthrough) VM is running a fresh new install of XP and only iTunes, and it connects via a Samba share (Windows is configured to re-connect the network drive (Z:) on startup) to the music library.

The iTunes library was a complete PITA to move. There are lots of how tos and such like on the web but when it boils down to it, you need to check, very carefully, the structure in the iTunes Library.xml file so it matches the new location of the music itself. What didn’t help me was discovering, after several failed attempts, that iTunes at some stage in the past, had decided to create two complete “Compilation” and “Podcasts” directory structures, each with mostly different content, but some of it overlapping.

Essentially, the process is something like this:

• Backup the whole library!
• Create the new library location and copy in the data
• Delete the *.itl files from the root of the iTunes library
• Examine the iTunes Library.xml file and use a good editor/comparison tool to alter all the paths so they point to the correct locations in your new library structure
• Fire up iTunes, edit the Music Library location to where the new one lives
• Under the File menu (IIRC) you choose “import library” and point it at your modified iTunes Library.xml file
• Cross your fingers, toes and anything else

Judicious use of that great comparison tool Meld and my eyeballs meant that finally I managed to restructure the library so it was consistent and not duplicated. I think that had it not been like this, my experience would not have been so bad or so lengthy, but iTunes will leave always a very nasty taste in my mouth. Also, had Windows not completely barfed (again) I would have been able to use the already installed iTunes app and move the library using it’s own built in tools (as this is apparently possible according to the interweb).

Probably the next step will be to introduce Helen to Songbird (or similar) and see if we can migrate the library, playlists and music across to that. I’ll do some playing on my own before suggesting it though. Small steps to catchy monkey I think.

VirtualBox 3.02 seems to be really good though. The USB pass through and auto-filtering is just brilliant (so Ubuntu doesn’t alert when you plug in the iPod when the VM is running; it goes straight through to the Windows VM). It does seem to take quite a long time for the whole Windows/iTunes thing to settle down after I’ve plugged the iPod in but it might be just because it’s a big 120G iPod anyway… But it isn’t a major issue.

So, although Windows isn’t completely dead in our household, it is certainly on its very last legs. And good riddance to it to.

Asus 1008HA with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha2

Following my earlier post about getting the Microsoft Tax on the Asus netbook refunded very efficiently and painlessly by Amazon, I’ve been doing a little reading, formatting, re-partitioning, installing and updating.

The newest PC in The Open Sourcerer’s household is now duly christened, cleansed and freed from proprietary software hell and will, from this moment forth, be known as Magrat. All our machines are named after characters from the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett.

I thought I’d take a quick screenshot:

magrat running Ubuntu 9.10.

That’s me being filmed by the built-in webcam and I have printed a list of the disk partitions showing that there are now no NTFS or FAT left. The fourth partition was already on the disk and is for Asus’ “Boot Booster” utility which, from what I can tell simply dumps the BIOS and the results of some the POSTs into this partition and it causes the unit to get from power up to grub in about 1/2sec flat! So I thought I’d leave that one for now.

I re-partitioned the HDD to have a 15GB Ext4 partition for /, about 135GB for /home using ext3, and a 2GB swap partition.

Apart from a minor hiccup early on with the eth0 device disappearing, probably due to my incompetence rather than anything else, everything seems to be working as it should. The Wifi was detected, the screen looks great, the webcam, speakers and mic all work. I chose Karmic as the WiFi hardware for this netbook is a fairly recent addition to the Linux kernel and although it seems to be supported in the more recent Jaunty kernels, there still seemed to be some issues on various forums, whereas one contributor reported a perfect install using Karmic very recently.

So here’s the Asus Eee 1008HA PC running the regular Desktop version of Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Alpha 2 (I’ve removed several stickers from the area below the keyboard. These were telling me about some proprietary OS that I didn’t want in the first place):

Magrat in the flesh.

I may well use the UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) edition one day, but I do like having Compiz and multiple desktops around; something that doesn’t really “fit” with the UNR interface. But the cool thing is I have the freedom to choose…

For those interested in knowing more about the hardware of the Asus 1008HA, here’s the output of lshw, lspci -v, and dmidecode.

Getting your Microsoft Tax Refunded: 10/10 for Amazon UK! [Updated]

Yesterday I received a great prize from the people at Miserware for helping with the Beta trial of their power saving software for Linux computers; a new and very shiny Asus 1008HA netbook PC.

The PC itself looks brilliant and I can’t wait to use it. However, it is unfortunate that Asus seem to have been bought-off by Microsoft so they will no longer sell these devices with anything other than Windows software. Software that I for one have absolutely no intention of using.

Turning the machine on for the first time I was amazed at just how long it took for the first-time-run license window to appear. Anyway, it did eventually:

Windows XP EULA Screen

If you can read the text in the EULA on the left, the important bit states:

“If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE, and you should promptly contact Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund in accordance with Manufacturer’s return policies.”

Do also take a look at the conditions imposed in the second box too (click the images for a big piccy). Basically it says you can’t change your mind once you have said yes and that they don’t actually provide any “warranty” anyway. What complete and utter claptrap. Why on earth do people continue to put up with this rubbish?

And so, when you say you do not want to accept their unfair and ridiculously one-sided licenses, you are told to turn of the machine. Fine. Suits me.

XP says turn off machine.

First off I thought I’d ask Amazon what the correct procedure is for requesting a refund. So I sent them an email from my Amazon account last night (at about 10:00pm):

Requesting procedure for license refund

This morning I had one of those slightly annoying automated replies telling me that because the order wasn’t actually to do with my account (which is correct):

“For security reasons, we can only take action on an account when the request comes from the e-mail address related to that account. Hence we request you to contact us from relevant account.”

There were a couple of helpful links in the mail – one of which was to use if you found the email response hadn’t been helpful or resolved your issue. Clicking that took me to a page on Amazon’s site where I was invited to get them to call me. Within 20seconds or so I was talking to a real person (probably in Ireland from his accent). I explained that I didn’t want the Windows XP software and was intending to format the drive and install Linux (he seemed to understand exactly what I was talking about). He asked what version of Windows was on the computer, and then basically said ‘OK. We’ll refund the cost of the license to the buyer’. And that was it.

I should point out that the chap at Amazon also suggested that I check with Asus that removing the software might invalidate my warranty on the device. I have searched on Google and on Asus’ website and read the Warranty card that comes with the device. I couldn’t see anything that would indicate my warranty would be void if I change the software. I have mailed Asus to try and confirm it will be OK. [Update: I've just had a message back from Asus saying my Warranty will fine. They don't "support" other operating systems but I can understand that completely] Frankly, it would be a pretty USELESS warranty for a computer if it became void by installing new software. But I am not a lawyer so don’t take my word for this and YMMV.

Within a minute or so of ending my phone call with Amazon a copy of an email to the Miserware account holder at Amazon dropped into my inbox.

Dear Melissa/ cc Alan

I have requested a refund to your payment card for this purchase in the amount of 40.00 GBP for this order, as Alan will not be using the Windows XP Software. Refunds usually go through within 2 to 3 business days and you will see this amount credited on your next statement…

Brilliant. I can’t really praise Amazon enough for that. It was easy, simple and no fuss.

I guess my only concern is that the cost of this refund might not get passed back to Asus. But at least the information is in the public domain on this blog. Also, I should think if Amazon had to do this more than occasionally they’d be asking some hard questions of Asus…

Now I need your help dear readers…
I am not yet sure what to put on this machine: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Cruchbang (which I have heard some good things about but not tried) or something else… Suggestions are more than welcome I have plenty of choice! And I plan to use it!

And finally.

Come on Asus, you have some really nice products crying out for a proper operating system and it’s a real shame you have allowed yourself to be stitched-up by Microsoft. If you would like me to put you in touch with the guy responsible for OEMs at Canonical (Ubuntu) Just let me know. I’m sure he’d be delighted to talk to you.

OT. The Open Sourcerer, on Location with Robin Hood 

This weekend my wife suggested we went for a walk in the Bourne Woods near where we live.

There was a great deal of activity in this Forestry Commission owned tract of woodland back in 2000 when they filmed part of the Roman epic Gladiator. Now, Russell Crowe is back in Farnham this time donning his green tights and hanging out with a band of Merry Men for a remake of Robin Hood.

At weekends, you are able to stroll around very close to the set and see what goes on. It was a fascinating walk…

Walking toward the "Castle"

Castle from the front

Back of Castle

What the back of the Castle really looks like

Heavily fortified Village

Creating a Hay Field Harvest Scene

Medieval Command Tent?

Alfresco Dining

Cart before the horse

Another cart or charriot?

Little John's Trailer

It’ll be quite fun now to see the film when it goes on general release.