Windows vs. Linux: The Patent Tax
With tax day approaching in America, we at the Software Freedom Law Center wanted to share some important information about the hidden taxes added to every copy of Microsoft's Windows operating system. If you run a computer using Windows, you're not just paying for the programmers who put the program together and the corporate operations that brought it to market. You're also paying a hidden tax of well over $20 that Microsoft has had to pay to other patent holders. This is true whether you bought your copy of Windows on CD or pre-installed on a laptop, desktop, or server machine.
While $20 might not sound like a lot, it adds up pretty quickly. A school with only 50 Windows machines — barely enough for one class of students — is paying $1,000 of its limited budget in patent tax, rather than buying books or other useful supplies. A government agency with a mere couple hundred Windows machines is paying many thousands of taxpayer dollars in patent tax.
On the other hand, free operating systems based on Linux have never been found guilty of patent infringement, making Linux a patent-tax-free alternative to Windows. Not only do these free software systems have no patent tax, they have no taxes whatsoever, because — like all open source software — they are available to the public at zero cost.
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