[ltp] Re: thinkpad without windows?

[joe peterson]

I think you are being too hard on IBM. I'd *guess* that at least 95% of 
the thinkpads sold are running pre-installed M$ products, and the 
current arrangement caters to those customers. If IBM couldn't offer 
thinkpads with XP preinstalled for a competitive price, then those 95% 
would be shopping elsewhere in a heartbeat, and the rest of us wouldn't 
have thinkpads to tinker with.

Besides, IBM has given plenty back to the open source community such as 
code for management of large disk arrays, symmetric multiprocessing 
(SMP), databases, etc. not to mention lawyers/money for the SCO debacle.

bottom line is that IBM is a business, and they are simply using the 
market to the advantage of many and slight inconvenience of a few.


>Henrik Brix Andersen <brix@gentoo.org> writes:
>
>  
>
>>On Tue, 2004-11-02 at 06:00, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>"IBM Recommends Windows XP Professional."
>>>
>>>That's all you have to see, at the top of every ThinkPad ordering
>>>page last I checked, to know that IBM doesn't care about other
>>>OSes.
>>>      
>>>
>>IBM doesn't care about non-Microsoft operating systems? Which rock have
>>you been living under?
>>    
>>
>
>A company that wholeheartedly endorses Windows in such a frank
>manner, and then claims to support Linux, is two-faced at best.
>It's like donating money to a political candidate and then voting
>for his opponent.  Yes, IBM supports Linux in some ways.  No,
>they don't really care about it--they recommend you use Windows
>instead.
>  
>