Yup, it is too bad.
Years ago I helped out a department at a local university who didn’t have much money. This was around 2003-2004 or so. They had several old file servers with Windows NT 4.0 on them, wanted to upgrade to Server 2003 but couldn’t afford one let alone several licenses. This was long before the university started using an Enterprise Agreement which give unlimited licenses via KMS...
Anyway, I put RedHat 5.0 on them and set up SAMBA for the file shares. You could not tell the difference, even browsing through the mapped drives in XP’s Windows Explorer. The systems were old, getting out of warranty, but they had about 30 of them to play with that had the same hardware. I only set up five, telling them to use the others to cannibalize parts until they got some money.
Anyway, the local sys admin, who was in my user group, a few years later wanted me to sneak him some “free” Server 2003 product keys. This was for those same file servers. I asked him what was wrong with the setup I made for him. He said that Linux was too hard, and it kept him up at night worrying what he’d do if they crashed! So he reinstalled all of them with bootleg copies of Server 2003.
How much work was it for him or her to reformat the servers with Server 2003? Sounds like a painful stressful process. But maybe job security?