While most people are sitting on their couch playing Wrath of the Drunken Clan Monkeys, members of the Linux and the Open Source community are hard at work developing GPL software, patches and fixes. Developers benefit from this and eventually so do end users of commercial software. And software like Vuescan, which is ported to Linux, will benefit from input by active Linux developers. They have paid some of their dues already, and the author of Vuescan is acknowledging that. Anyway, it's not that big a freebie since there are other printer and scanner drivers already developed for Linux (and free, too.)

Why don't you also complain to Adobe and Microsoft and Macromedia and Apple, etc.. They give massive discounts to educators. An educator can buy the Adobe Creative Suite Premium from the Academic Superstore for less than a third of the street price. And some university faculty and admins make $100,000 plus a year......