Re: [Fsfe-uk] Cheats!

[Ian Lynch]

On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 19:22 +0000, Alan Pope wrote:

> This certainly happens when customers buy large complex software
> products which don't work as expected. 

Like customs and Excise or the Inland Revenue? Excuse my sceptism.
So they get a reduction - maybe. They could of course use the money to
employ developers to fix their problems. In the case of the NHS, they
pay more to MS for 3 years licenses than it cost to buy Star Division
and do all the subsequent development on OpenOffice.org. If the
customers are big enough to exert that much muscle, its pretty certain
that the amounts they are paying in license fees would pay for any
development work needed to fix any problem. Whether with a paid for
license or a Free one, they would still have the same problem if it
didn't work ie getting it fixed asap. Quicker to employ developers than
start negotiating legal arguments before the supplier decides to fix it
for a reduced fee that is still > zero fees.

There might be some exceptions but in the biggest selling titles such as
Windows and MS Office I doubt suing Microsoft is much of an option.

-- 
Ian Lynch <address@hidden>
ZMS Ltd