I mean it's more obscured but if you buy an Apple computer you are paying the MacOS tax, right? They can call the OS free all they like, but clearly the OS add

I mean it's more obscured but if you buy an Apple computer you are paying the MacOS tax, right? They can call the OS free all they like, but clearly the OS adds value to their hardware. If, say, RedHat wanted to sell an OS to a person who uses an Apple computer are they not also asking that potential customer to pay the same kind of "double tax" referenced? It seems like it to me, Apple just sells the hardware too so they can play pricing games and pretend the OS is valueless while the hardware is what you're paying for. Sure, it's different in that they're probably not doing anything illegal -- they're not leveraging their monopoly to force other vendors to give them money for nothing because they are the vendor, but it is awfully parallel if the question you're asking is "why isn't Linux desktop marketshare increasing?" Does it not do just as much harm to their customer if they can't buy the hardware minus a real reasonable price for the OS because they're going to use Linux on it? Again, I'm not suggesting they're illegally leveraging a monopoly because they are also the vendor of the hardware and one company bundling their hardware with their software is common. But I am suggesting that they're not a counterpoint to the idea that this kind of "double tax" is holding back Linux use. If anything, it's a small point in favor of the idea that the author might be on to something... I'd personally argue more that for profit companies leveraging free software without paying for its development is the root cause of project decay and poorly funded free software projects. Granted this is by design, but it's pretty embarrassing for our style of capitalism that there's not any kind of recognition among MBAs that they might have an ethical obligation to donate to people who are doing work their entire business requires to operate.