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All the more reason (as if anyone needed it) to seriously look at Linux as an alternative. I run Suse Linux, OpenOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox as my OS and primary apps. I have no MS software on my system.

The EULA is yet another scary example of how MS believes they have everyone by the short hairs and they can get away with anything. It is time for people to stop automatically forking over hundreds of dollars for hardware and software "upgrades" because the MS marketing machine says you need it.

Anyone and everyone with a CDR in their computer, go to http://www.knoppix.org - download and burn a "live" CD image. You can boot Linux right from your CD (check your BIOS settings for boot devices) and try it. No muss, no fuss, no commitment, no reformatting your hard disk. Just try it. (note, yes it will run a little slow loading everything off the CD all the time) Then ask yourself, do I really need MS? Do I really want to put up with this kind of er.. "stuff"? Do I really want to support a company with business practices like this and such low regard for its customer base?

I think MS may be a little scared at the moment. In this sense, MS may be reacting like people do. Under stress, we all tend to revert to primitive ways. MS's instinctual reaction to the threat may be to revert to the monopolistic ways that got it in legal trouble before. What threat? Linux and open source software. It is finally getting easy enough to use, and good enough, that most people could switch. (they just don't know it) But the threat is real.

I was in a Barnes and Noble the other day and there was more shelf space devoted to Linux than Windows. That was an eye-opener for me. What no-doubt scares the sanity right out of MS is that for about $50 I could walk out of B&N with any one of several full distributions of Linux, including a full office suite, email, web browsing, image manipulation, multimedia, etc. with links and pointers to where to find other applications (free or very very reasonably priced), and a book/tutorial on how to set it all up. Why would I go out and pay several times that for Vista? Oh, and these Linux distros run on my existing hardware. In fact, as a test, I have Suse 10.0 running on an old Pentium-II at 450 MHz, with 320MB of memory and a whopping 8GB hard disk. Its no speed demon, but it works. I don't think I could even get XP or Vista to attempt an install. Most of these households that are using their computers for email, web surfing, some documents, pictures, and spreadsheets... Don't need an expensive OS and application suite. They could have it all basically for the cost of a couple of CDRs and some download time.