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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

What gets me is... what's the point? If you don't want to fight MS about selling PCs with no OS, ship some Linux distro. DOS was a nice option when you needed to support bare-metal stuff like flashing the BIOS without a modern OS getting in the way, but I would be shocked if that worked here - basically, I can see reasons to ship DOS, but they're all mutually incompatible with a virtual machine. And if you're going to ship a Linux distro - heck even if you're going to include some weird DOS VM - why would you ever ship multiple different versions?

So yeah, I'm thinking horribly broken company process and/or outsourcing without actually making sure the requirements make sense.

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It seems pretty obvious to me. There were issues getting the old FreeDOS image to run on some of the new hardware. Someone was tasked by their manager with fixing it. They said fuck it and just did this because it was easier/faster than trying to troubleshoot DOS on modern hardware. They showed it to their manager and their manager saw FreeDOS boot and was happy. Until now no one ever noticed because FreeDOS is just the "I'm going to pirate windows option".

I'm the author of the article and that is my conclusion also.

Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to support that linux distro.

Selling it with freedos, you only have to support freedos, and people who buy that option will install something else anyway.

> Shipping your PC with "some linux distro" means you have to support that linux distro.

But they do offer to ship with a Linux distro, even apart from this strange frankensystem option. Did you miss where straight Ubuntu is a pre-install option?

According to another commenter some laptops don't have Ubuntu as an option (likely due to some sort of driver issues).

Yes and they charge for that, so that's consistent with what the parent comment said.

Erm...no? Look at the screenshot in the article. There is no charge for Ubuntu in that shot, only for Windows.

Oops, you're right. I did look at the screenshot before but totally misread it (probably because Ubuntu is just blank in the price column rather than $0, and there's no horizontal lines (thanks Tufte)).

>>means you have to support that linux distro.

But why or how? I just don't see that at all. Dell won't "support" FreeDOS either. It could be just a basic Ubuntu install that's broken as hell, and I don't see why or how Dell would need to support that.

> If you don't want to fight MS about selling PCs with no OS, ship some Linux distro.

And that's exactly what they're doing. They just did the bare minimum work to be able to fit that Linux setup under their pre-existing "FreeDOS" SKU. And the real point of that SKU is for sophisticated users to wipe the whole thing clean and set up their own OS install. It still works perfectly for that.

How does this "FreeDOS" option work better for that than selecting the straight Ubuntu option they offer, and wiping that clean?

It avoids HP paying Canonical and/or taking support calls on hundreds of Ubuntu feature packages.

The Ubuntu option appears to be free too.

Free to you, but HP is likely paying Ubuntu. They wouldn't be paying much, but they're probably paying something.

The Ubuntu license says that if they make any modification whatsoever, no matter how trivial, they can no longer call it Ubuntu. Just adding a driver is enough to trigger the clause, AFAICT.

I doubt that.

Most likely it is an agreement that is seen as a win on both party. HP has no incentive to pay ubuntu for anything, and ubuntu can't get any new market if it starts asking companies to pay for it.

And they could use whatever distro they want that do not have those clauses instead of ubuntu.

The agreements would have been signed when Ubuntu had >50% Linux market share. Increasing share is not particularly helpful in that scenario compared to increasing revenue per seat.

Also, these agreements are Ubuntu's primary revenue source, AFAICT. And they have hundreds of millions in revenue per annum. Primarily from the cloud vendors.

All distros have these clauses. The software is free, but the name is a protected registered trade mark. Not all distros enforce it, but the HP lawyers will ensure HP is covered.

Finally corporate buyers will want a trusted distribution, not the flavor du jour.

As far as I heard from Canonical employees, Canonical was getting more per sold XPS13 (original Developer Edition) with Ubuntu than Microsoft did for every Windows being sold on the same laptop: when it was introduced, at the very least.

My guess is that it's offered for those who want to do their own Windows install but would be confused or scared away by seeing "Linux" in the name. "FreeDOS" is the codeword for no-OS, you install your own.

They’ve been doing it for 20 years, so I’d guess that there is some sort of contractural rationale between HP and Microsoft.

HP ships Ubuntu in thin clients by default. So the fact they are doing this implies some specific reason.

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