>It's worth noting that the ruling could be bad news for free software, which is rarely offered on new machines.<p>If "free software" were desirable to consumers, hardware makers would be glad to stop paying for Windows and pass some portion of the savings on to the customer. It's win-win for them. But so few people are willing to do this that it's not in their best interest to offer machines in the additional configurations, even if that only amounts to 1 more (no software) per machine.<p>I don't even want to think about the support hassles for that scenario, with people simply choosing the cheaper computer and not understanding what they are getting.