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On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Guy Backhouse wrote: > Maybe the tax I refer to as the illegal tax (it's an EU tax and we > haven't had a referendum!) of VAT has a lot to answer for the problem; > Microsoft charges and the government get massive tax revenue so only pay > lip service to open source with on substance to back up the cause. That would not explain why the UK lags behind the rest of the world (including other EU countries) though. Also, if people would not buy Microsoft software, and the government would miss out on that chunk of VAT, they would likely spend it on other things. Which they will still pay VAT on. Moreover, some of these 'things' may have been produced by UK-based companies, as opposed to US-based Microsoft. Hence through corporation tax, one could argue that the government would actually benefit from people ditching Windows. My guess would be that, compared to people in other countries, people in the UK tend to be more hype-sensitive (as Viv suggested), and more willing to buy off responsibility by buying support and stuff (as Simon seemed to suggest). How much does the fact that it is usually free (apart from support etc) play against Open Source? If my employer would have bought an expensive piece of software that didn't do what I wanted it to do, I would blame the software. If it had been free, I would blame my employer for being cheap. Martijn. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq