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I wonder how much of its popularity is tied to the fact that it is free.

Probably some. But licensing issues, openness, and adherence to standards probably has more to do with it.

Licensing issues because you have to pay for the licenses and development software under Windows. My own experience. :)

I am speaking from a user and consumer perspective and have been trying to push our business to adopt Linux because... it is free. We have 100+ computers that are used to open and view pdf files and occasionally open Excel. It makes a lot of sense to go all Linux. However, our IT guy is not comfortable with that.

Plus, we do use specialized software that would have to be compatible with Linux. Unfortunately, the Linux option wasn't considered when we were shopping around for this type of software. Software that we paid $200K for.

We have three servers that are all running Windows.