Good advice there from slim_slag
Microsoft will surely attempt to punish Dell in some way for this move. They certainly have a long history of gutting businesses that stray from the party-line. These companies work on razor-thin margins and even a few percentage points increase in the fee that Dell pays for its OEM Windows license could really hurt.
"I am sure Dell will use this as an opportunity to heavily brand the desktop, try and lock you into their services, and make more money off you in an innovative way. For Dell are just as bad as MS, Oracle, Sun and the rest of them. They all want to 'own' your desktop experience and make it difficult for you to use anybody elses software."
A very astute observation. Happily even GPLv2 makes this quite difficult. Of course Dell plans to make money from this and the GPL does not forbid profit at all - it only blocks certain kinds of exploitative behaviour.
Personally I'm not comfortable with the FSF's (Free Software Foundation) political stance [I'm more of an OSS guy myself] and thought that the proposed GPLv3 was ludicrously (and fatally) business hostile. The most recent GPLv3 draft seems to have eased off a bit and hopefully will allow the industry to successfully commoditise Linux on the desktop (as Dell hopes to do) while blocking an effectively proprietary Dell Linux.
While I'm a firm supporter of FOSS (I contribute financially and on various groups) and in particular of
open standards (like ODF) I'm not that fussed by proprietary drivers like nVidia and I will buy and use proprietary Linux apps if they work better for me than the FOSS equivalents. Sometimes FOSS coders need a kick up the arse too!
Mac