Mr Dell Does the *In*decent Thing

I was wrong:

UK users will have to pay a premium for Dell's Linux PCs, despite Dell's claim to the contrary.

Customers who live in the UK will have to pay over one-third more than customers in the US for exactly the same machine, according to detailed analysis by ZDNet.co.uk.

The Linux PCs — the Inspiron 530n desktop and the Inspiron 6400n notebook — were launched on Wednesday. The 530n is available in both the UK and the US, but the price differs considerably.

Comparing identical specifications, US customers pay $619 (£305.10) for the 530n, while UK customers are forced to pay £416.61 — a premium of £111, or 36 percent. The comparison is based on a machine with a dual-core processor, 19" monitor, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. The same options for peripherals were chosen.

Why?

In Praise of Nakedness

The impudence of Microsoft knows no bounds. According to this report in ZDNet UK, it is now doing the nudge-nudge, wink-wink to PC dealers that selling "naked" systems - those with no operating system installed - might be inadvisable, know what I mean?

According to the original article in its Partner Update magazine, "Microsoft is recruiting two 'feet on the street' personnel whose role will be to provide proactive assistance during customer visits" in other words, threatening to send in the heavy mob to duff up customers, too. Although Microsoft hurriedly "retracted" this part of the story, if it was a slip, it was surely Freudian.

From this and other statements, it's clear that Microsoft sees every PC as its birthright, and naked PCs as, well, positively obscene. I'm an OS naturist, myself.

Open Source, Opener Source

Brian Behlendorf is an interesting individual: one of those quietly-spoken but impressive people you meet sometimes. When I talked to him about the birth of Apache - which he informed me was not "a patchy" server, as the folklore would have it, just a cool name he rather liked - he was working at CollabNet, which he had helped to found.

He's still there, even though the company has changed somewhat from those early days. But judging from a characteristically thought-provoking comment reported in one of ZDNet's blogs, he's not changed so much, and is still very much thinking and doing at the leading edge of open source.

In the blog, he was reported as saying that he saw more and more "ordinary people" being enfranchised as coders thanks to the new generation of programming models around - notably Ajax and the mashup - that made the whole process far easier and less intimidating.

If he's right, this is actually a profound shift, since ironically the open source model has been anything but open to the general public. Instead, you had to go through a kind of apprenticeship before you could stalk the hallowed corridors of geek castle.

If open really is becoming opener, it will be no bad thing, because the power of free software depends critically on having lots of programmers, and a good supply of new ones. Anything that increases the pool from which they can be drawn will have powerful knock-on effects.