2003-11-19-Microsoft-CA
Free Software Foundation Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA
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FSF Encourages Californians to Support Software Freedom with Microsoft Vouchers
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Boston, MA, USA
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Free Software Foundation
Ravi Khanna
communication@fsf.org
+1-617-542-5942
http://www.fsf.org/voucher.html
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is encouraging residents of California,
or anyone who purchased Microsoft software for use in California, to take
advantage of the offered vouchers, which are part of the Microsoft
class-action settlement with the state of California, to spread software
freedom.
Under the terms of a settlement, reached in California's antitrust and
unfair competition class action lawsuit against Microsoft, the company is
required to provide vouchers totaling up to $1.1 billion to eligible
California users of its Windows, MS-DOS, Office, Excel, Word, Works Suite
or Home Essentials 97 or 98 products. These vouchers can be redeemed for
cash as reimbursement for the purchase of other qualifying computer
hardware or software. They can also be donated to non-profit
organizations (even those outside of California) for their use in
purchasing software or hardware.
Californians, who like many others had little choice but to pay
Microsoft's high prices for its monopolistic proprietary software, now
have a unique opportunity to help the Free Software Movement. According
to Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director of FSF, "they can use this
class-action lawsuit, which at last forces Microsoft to give up some of
its ill-gotten gains, to support Free Software and the GPL. We encourage
people to donate their vouchers to FSF or to use them to purchase software
from FSF's GNU Press division. What could be better than to use
Microsoft's own resources to defend software freedom and the GPL?
FSF has set up a special webpage at http://www.fsf.org/voucher.html to help facilitate this transfer of some resources from Microsoft
to FSF. FSF asks anyone who purchased Microsoft software for use in
California to consider using them to help FSF.
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of Free (as
in freedom) Software - particularly the GNU operating system and its
GNU/Linux variants - and Free Documentation for Free Software. The FSF
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at
http://www.fsf.org, is an important source of information about GNU/Linux.
They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA.