Buying "gpl violations" at the local supermarket

Yes, it has come that far. I just wen to LIDL earlier today, making a test purchase of their latest notebook model, the Targa Traveller 826T MT23. It's a nice piece of hardware, no doubt. 1.8GHz AMD64 with 1GB RAM...

For those who don't know who LIDL is: It's one of Germany's largest budget retail stores (comparable to Walmart, although not in size of the enterprise).

However, I didn't buy the device because it was nice hardware, but because several people had informed me that this might be yet another incarnation of the ever-so-popular "Instant-On Media" devices. The idea is that you avoid booting into Windows by pre-installing a small custom-tailored Linux distribution with a media player (sometimes mplayer or xine, sometimes proprietary).

And obviously Targa is now the third notebook vendor offering such a feature without being GPL license compliant. I've recently figured that the Medion MD95500 and MD95800 (sold at ALDI, LIDL's biggest competitor) had the same issue. As had devices from one of the largest international notebook vendor, whose Name I shall not disclose at this time.

I cannot tell you how sick I am of all of this. Why doesn't anybody care to read the license? On a side note, I once asked an audience of lawyers if they had ever read the full MS EULA. Almost none of them did. Not even the lawyers(!).