[ Thanks to relic for this link.
]
“Rob says ‘With Linux, the customer often expects to get the
product for free and wants the retail price of Windows deducted
from his/her purchase price. There are no funds passed back to the
vendor and, because Linux is different, customers tend to place
more service calls —’ at $85 a call. As a result, the vendor
generally ends up losing money.’“Customers want the price deducted because they do not want to
support or pay a Microsoft tax. The hardware vendor collects these
payments and forwards them to Microsoft at their negotiated
contract price…”