As to the first part I have never seen how, on either of my systems, that the upgrade could happen without being authorized. Yes I have heard and read that it can but don't understand how. I think that in these cases it was authorized but the user just did not now that they did so. In any case the user could have rolled back to the previous OS easily. I DO believe that MS paid the $10,000.00 just to avoid litigation costs which would have been much higher even though MS would probably have won. Then there was the lady that sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot.............
As to if the Windows 10 upgrade is free, yes it is. Yes there are features such as Solitaire mentioned in the article that prompts you to pay to get rid of adds but that is totally up to you. Of course such things give MS more potential for income but it is still up to you as to whether you buy or do not.
Some will say that this is putting up unwanted ads and I suppose that it is. Still the user agreed to these ads when they accepted the license agreement. I just do not really see an issue. YES, as mentioned in the article, Solitaire has ads! OMG the world is going to end!
However the ads consist of an offer to upgrade to the premium version when launched and an unobtrusive ad at the bottom of the page. What is the big deal?
Hmmm, now that I think a bit more about the ad aspect have you ever been to EBay, Amazon or pretty much any other production web site? On such sites I tend to see many more ads than I'll ever see within Windows yet I don't hear the same complaints about these sites, why not? You will never see an ad in Windows 10 that is not contained within a free app that you chose to install. Yet, on all these web sites, you see so many ads that you cannot hardly even find the link to what you actually want. You have not even gotten anything yet for free but are still overwhelmed with ads.
Lordy!! I could go on forever on this but will force myself to stop.