China to ban sale of computers with preinstalled operating system

The Chinese government believes that it could help curb piracy by disallowing the PC manufacturers to sell computers without a preinstalled operating system. A senior official with the Beijing Copyright Bureau said in a statement that the government would ban selling of naked computers.

This ban is expected to be implemented by the end of this year and is aimed at protecting the intellectual property of software. However, consumers believe that this step is to help companies like Microsoft to sell more software in the country.

Wang Yefei, deputy director of the bureau added that the government departments would be told to not purchase computers without legitimate software and in addition, all domestically made and imported computers were required to be sold with legitimate software pre-installed.

He added that all the departments of the Beijing municipal government had been using genuine software. However, it would be interesting to see if this steps help in more usage of Linux operating system in the country as the manufacturers would be able to ship their hardware with free operating system without burdening the buyer.