French court orders Windows refund - The INQUIRER

I've been hearing about patent law, open source and anti-monopoly trends in Europe for a while, where it appears the anti-monopoly laws are far stricter than in the US. In my IT experience, I have not heard of a case where a software company had to face extraordinary regulatory compliance beyond the scope of the US. If it happened at all, as it surely must have, it was rote, a matter of procedure, and very straightforward.

Now, though, companies that thrive in US markets and have had success in the world have a higher standard to meet. Microsoft's infamously popular use of Bundling (getting hardware makers and/or retailers to install a Microsoft OS on a machine, and forcing them to to pay a license even if another OS is installed) gets attacked here. Very interesting turn.....

French court orders Windows refund - The INQUIRER: "The facts of the case, m'learned fiends, are these: one of my estemeed countrymen wrote to Asus - after having bought an Asus machine which came with XP pre-installed - requesting a refund for the price of the software, given his predeliction to open sauce. The manufacturer told the consumer that the refund procedure it would apply would end up costing more than the actual value of the refund - a not-so-paltry €130. Understandably, the fellow was a little miffed and took his case to court, where UFC stepped in to lend a helping hand.

"In France, it is illegal to bundle software and to refuse to reimburse the customer for unwanted licences, under Article L.122-1 of the French Consumer Code."

My Etherealmind · Network Dictionary - Backhoe Attenuation

Brilliant!

A term I've used in IT for years, a "backhoe issue", refers to a real-world risk scenario for any web or Internet-based services single point of failure. You can spend kajillions on your load balanced, fail-over, clustered, RAID-based and secure network software system, and still find your business's day-to-day revenues are stalled by the simple application of a backhoe somewhere between your company and a large subset (or the whole) of your user base.

I've heard it described, probably by a colleague, or a consultant at one of my previous employers, to describe issues that need to be addressed to achieve "five nines", or 99.999% up-time guaranties. It is nice to see a more "official" definition exists out there in the real world.

My Etherealmind · Network Dictionary - Backhoe Attenuation: "Network Dictionary - Backhoe Attenuation 15 February 2008 in CCIE, Design, Network Dictionary | No comments Backhoe Attenuation - term used to describe the loss of signal (attentuation) of your copper or fibre cable by a backhoe digging your cable out of the ground. Failure is usually severe as the entire cable will need to the replaced."

Typically, you try to solve for it at your network center by either by dividing your audience among multiple network centers, so fewer people are affected by a backhoe, or by having redundant connections to the Internet. At Metron, we installed a connection to AT&T through cabling under our front wall, and a second connection to another company under our back wall. (Notice different walls. Redundancy doesn't help very much when you have both redundant connections bunched together for your backhoe to take out with one dig.)