Maybe. However, this makes me wonder whether there's still some available wood in their coffin to hammer THIS nail in.

Old and Weary, the Terminator Returns once again, this time looking for a cozy retirement place. the world, however, does not agree with him...

He reads data off a herring and writes it on what he wears.

Companies make bad decisions all the time. The real question is: would they back off and reinstate the previous state of things? In this case, whether it was intentional or a mistake is less relevant; public backlash prompted them to reconsider (or realize the mistake) and the outcome is eventually positive. Did they lie about what happened? i don't know and frankly I don't care. All I care for is what the outcome is.

Yeah well I call that bullshit, no offense. 2250 hours worked per year translate to 56,25 weeks assuming 40 hours/week, that's more than a year's worth of work. It means they worked more than 40 hours per week, every week, no vacation, nothing, and that on average? Please...

What I meant, anyway, wasn't that they work a small amount of hours per week, but that they don't accomplish as much as they should, that's the issue here.
Also, it depends on what do you compare against.

On average, someone from India would boost their output if you ask them too, in a measurable way. Someone from Mexico, on the other hand, will appear to do so, whenever possible. Of course, it depends on the output type. If they're producing nails, then a simple count would reveal the truth. If they're working support tickets, on the other way... I have quite a few stories in my sleeve on that, but a short general example is as follows:

Eac member of support had a (badly designed) workload target of 25 tickets per day. Each analyst from India was reporting an average of 20-22 tickets a day, and each member from Chile and Mexico was reporting an average of 7-29 tickets a day. You would say they're working harder than their Indian counterparts, and the general idea was like this for years, until I came along as LoB "report builder" (so-to-speak).

Now I built and run the following monthly reports ([country is either IN or MX]):

1. - Sum of non-unique tickets worked by all analysts from [country]
2. - Sum of unique tickets worked by analysts from [country]
3. - Average daily tickets worked by analysts from [country]

For Mexico, value of report 1. was almost 4 times higher than value of report 2. (actual number 3.89)
For India, it was a bit over 2 (2.17)

I was puzzled until I checked what was happening. Turned out analysts from Mexico were passing the same ticket around, so that each got a +1 in their personal tickets worked count. neat, isn't it. Analyst 1 would send an e-mail to the customer, analyst 2 would change the ticket status, analyst 3 would put a nice note, and so on. That's because they KNEW what are they measured against and were happily circumventing the system.

No further comment.

I'm Romanian, so a better name would be "Mihail Abagiu" which means "Michael Jer Kopf".

If you're only considering administration, yes. However, the costs skyrocket if you encounter an issue where some deep inner workings of the OS need to be debugged. Admins won't help you there. You might want to get support straight from the source. Furthermore, there are critical environments where your incurred losses due to outages and lack of official support greatly offset the savings. Think "12 hours of outage cost the company more than 5 years of support license".

I don't even want to start thinking of really critical environments where an outage might cost lives.

Oracle Database is free to download and install. Oh you want support for it? Tough luck.
On the other hand, Microsoft licenses include support to start with, albeit basic. You indeed need to pay extra for the whole 9 yards.

Saying "Linux is free" is too vague to make a point. You need to say "Linux is free to download and install and use" - and yes I agree with that. However, if you don't factor in additional costs (because we're talking about businesses here), then you're doing it wrong.

Car analogy: you can win a car at a competitions, but you have to factor in maintenance, because if you're piss poor, you won't afford to maintain it. What do you do if it breaks down? How do you pay taxes for it? Etc.

I guess it depends on job type. I've been dealing mainly with IT Support jobs, Call Centers and the like.

...And beyond. Goverments, by definition, abide to the above rules fully.

Good point!

Such a test would resemble dumb Facebook games:
  Achievement unlocked: clicked mouse.
  Achievement unlocked: typed your name.
  BONUS Achievement unlocked: +5 points. Buy more with your credit card!

Your post is so full of urban myths, disinformation and wrong assumptions, that the only true words I could find were "the", "or", "who", "a" and "and".

Maybe... there are no plans to speak of?

Wishful thinking. If I had moderator points, I would be torn between Funny and Insightful.