On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 20:24 +0100, Martin Hauge wrote: > The problem is that 12 of the 18 Norwegian counties have signed at School > Agreement contract with Microsoft. This contract claims that all the PCs in > each school must be counted to fulfil the contract. The School Agreement is > a cheap and easy-to-administrate licence-arrangement. Up till now more than > 50.000 MS licences are sold on a 3 years contract-period. > > The bad news for OOo is that if a school want to save some licence costs by > let some classrooms run OOo, the school still have to pay Microsoft-licenses > - also for the OOO-PCs. In other words, the schools have to pay > Microsoft-licences also for Linux- and OOo PCs.
Its probably illegal if the country has fair trading law. If its on a big scale it would be worth challenging. > We now hope that the competition authorities will interfere with the School > Agreement and its monopoly confirming effects. As far as I have understood, > those contracts were forbidden already in 1994. http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1998/80041--c.htm#18 This link is to the 1998 UK competition act that is based on EU law. This might not affect Norway as it is not a member of the EU but I would encourage anyoneany reading this in a country that is in the EU to look into making an official complaint. It costs nothing and just a little time. I made a complaint to the UK Office of Fair Trading about 3 years ago. It triggered a full investigation and they don't do that unless they are fairly sure there is evidence of the law being broken. The outcome is really a compromise. Because Microsoft Schools Agreement is not so heavily used here in the UK the OFT decided to just put the case on hold to save the court costs arguing that the market effect (here) is not worth the cost of going to court. If the situation changes they will, so MS is not off the hook and it will have cost them a lot to provide their 30,000 pages of evidence :-). If in another country MSSA is more widely adopted it could well be worth the local government taking things further and there are also opportunities to use the surrounding publicity. The way to make a complaint is to find a company that supports Linux and for that company to complain to the authorities that they are being blocked from the market due to the fact that if they try and sell to a school and even give their product away, the school on MSSA still has to pay MS. In UK (EU) law this is clearly in breach of Chapter II and abuse of a dominant position in the market. 18 (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions. ie Making people pay for machines that don't run any of your software is easily seen to be an unfair trading condition. (d) making conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of the contract. Making people pay for machines that run none of your software is an obligation that is arguably not connected with the subject of the contract ie payment of license fees for the software you use on specific machines. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
