>>Service is what the maker wants! That is where the profit is. As far as I can tell, the computer business works the same way!
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>I think it is fair to say that if people don't pay for a product, they are unlikely to pay for service for the product. I don't know a single person that uses Linux that has paid for a distro or has paid for tech support for that distro.

Well, you know me and I pay for my SuSE distros. All $70 bucks, 8 CDs and 5 manuals of it. Call me a romantic.. call me foolhardy, but, I give a lot of copies of it away too! :-) The service model for company income only works when the service the people are supplying is esoteric enough to warrant paying for it. Contrary to popular FUD, Linux isn't any harder to install or use on a PC than WinXX. In areas where the average WinXX user needs IT support the Linux user more than likely will to.

However, the fact that most Linux users don't call or pay for tech support is because they don't have to. Linux doesn't crash very often. I have had only two crashes in the last four years, and both were caused by bugs in C++ code that I wrote, while learning C++, that locked up the keyboard and mouse. Seeing that I run a lot of beta code because I am a member of some development groups, I have apps crash on occasion, but they don't bring down KDE or Linux.

Besides, the talk about making money selling propriatary software on PCs may be moot if the path of PC evolution continues the way it's going, with all apps becoming embedded in hardware, which is where the profit will be. How many of you can write embedded apps? Have you read Microsoft's website on the benies of using XP as an embedded OS? Have you run TCO analyses comparing XP against the Linux kernel in embedded space? It's very interesting.