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You should live in Australia, Justin
Australia's Trade Practices Act makes anti-competitive behaviour illegal in the lucky country 
Your analogy with the TV and SmartPhone is invalid, as these are "appliances" by virtue of having a fixed, defined function (albeit that is becoming much broader), and it is only in recent times that they have contained a "computer". As much as there are now Internet connected fridges and TVs, I can't see myself using them to update the accounting system, develop applications or compile code. The intent of the manufacturers is to use that capability to deliver services, not to turn them into general purpose computing devices.
The PC has always been a general computing device and for those of us who have been around prior to its inception, was originally sold sans operating system and the buyer then either wrote their own or purchased one of several alternatives. While true that practice pre-dates usage by non-nerds, it sets the scene.
There has always been a choice of operating system for PCs, even if we go back to the DR-DOS / MS-DOS days. In addition to the more recent history of retail chain stores selling PCs, there are still a lot of businesses that sell parts and you can either buy the parts and build it yourself or for a small fee, pick the parts and they will build it for you. In either of these latter scenarios, purchase of an operating system is optional.
There was a legal case (my memory suggests it was in South Australia), some time back (maybe 5 years ago), where Dell offered a PC with Windows pre-installed and priced it as a package with no option to just buy the hardware. The case against Dell was successful and subsequently they had to offer the option of just hardware purchase. In this case the buyer wanted to load Linux and while Dell tried to make the case (undoubtedly prompted by M$) that purchase of hardware without an operating system was likely to result in a purchaser loading a pirated copy of Windows, the buyer proved that was not necessarily the case, as he wanted to load Linux. Forcing him to buy an operating system we neither wanted or would use was seen as anti-competitive by the court and as a contravention of the Trade Practices Act.
These days, Dell provide the alternate option of pre-loaded RHEL on a reasonable range of their PCs and all servers. Indeed, on qualified servers there is also the option of pre-loaded VMware and thus no user O/S.
P.S. I'm a self confessed Nerd. I designed and built my first computer. Bought the chips and designed, etched, drilled soldered, wrote the firmware, wrote the O/S. That was back in the early 1970's and pre-dated the PC.
Your analogy with the TV and SmartPhone is invalid, as these are "appliances" by virtue of having a fixed, defined function (albeit that is becoming much broader), and it is only in recent times that they have contained a "computer". As much as there are now Internet connected fridges and TVs, I can't see myself using them to update the accounting system, develop applications or compile code. The intent of the manufacturers is to use that capability to deliver services, not to turn them into general purpose computing devices.
The PC has always been a general computing device and for those of us who have been around prior to its inception, was originally sold sans operating system and the buyer then either wrote their own or purchased one of several alternatives. While true that practice pre-dates usage by non-nerds, it sets the scene.
There has always been a choice of operating system for PCs, even if we go back to the DR-DOS / MS-DOS days. In addition to the more recent history of retail chain stores selling PCs, there are still a lot of businesses that sell parts and you can either buy the parts and build it yourself or for a small fee, pick the parts and they will build it for you. In either of these latter scenarios, purchase of an operating system is optional.
There was a legal case (my memory suggests it was in South Australia), some time back (maybe 5 years ago), where Dell offered a PC with Windows pre-installed and priced it as a package with no option to just buy the hardware. The case against Dell was successful and subsequently they had to offer the option of just hardware purchase. In this case the buyer wanted to load Linux and while Dell tried to make the case (undoubtedly prompted by M$) that purchase of hardware without an operating system was likely to result in a purchaser loading a pirated copy of Windows, the buyer proved that was not necessarily the case, as he wanted to load Linux. Forcing him to buy an operating system we neither wanted or would use was seen as anti-competitive by the court and as a contravention of the Trade Practices Act.
These days, Dell provide the alternate option of pre-loaded RHEL on a reasonable range of their PCs and all servers. Indeed, on qualified servers there is also the option of pre-loaded VMware and thus no user O/S.
P.S. I'm a self confessed Nerd. I designed and built my first computer. Bought the chips and designed, etched, drilled soldered, wrote the firmware, wrote the O/S. That was back in the early 1970's and pre-dated the PC.
Posted by david.hunt@...
Updated - 24th Jan 2012
