Dear Debianistas: John Hasler wrote: > The manufacturer may be paying Microsoft a fixed fee for > every machine he ships rather than for every copy of > Microsoft Windows he ships. This makes sense when nearly > every machine has Microsoft Windows installed. Precisely. But the sense is inverted. Nearly every machine has a copy of MS Windows installed because the manufacturer pays a fixed fee for every machine shipped. When this whole thing started to snowball (as in when MS had gotten a solid foothold by selling MS-DOS for lots less than the P-system or CP/M-86) MS made an offer no one in her right mind could refuse. Their per-hardware-unit-sold license was so much cheaper than the per-OS-copy-sold license that it made no sense to do anything else. Thus, any system sent out already had the cost of MS-DOS (later MS Windows) built into its price. Hence, remarks about the ``Microsoft Tax''. Once this happens, adding any other OS, no matter what (>= 0) its price, means more effort for the manufacturer. It raises the cost of the sale, and Linux is frozen out by economics. Q.E.D. -- Best wishes, Max Hyre
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