Hardware drivers, such as those for a scanner, are pretty much a chicken/egg story. The people that make scanners mostly feel it's not worth their time to support Linux (or OSX in some cases), so they don't make drivers, or even provide the basic info needed for others to make open source drivers. The bigger market share linux gets, more companies will consider it a valid option and will begin shipping their hardware (and software) for linux. Some do this already, but not nearly all.
So, if Linux got 30% of the desktop market (not likely to happen any time soon), then the people making scanners would ship them with linux software too...or risk loosing 30% of their sales.
As a side note. Many normal people may be using Linux or Free/OpenBSD today without knowing it, in things like the Android Phones, some GPS's, network router, the server hosting their web page, and so on. The core of OSX is based on BSD, which is open source and similar to Linux in many ways, just with spiffy Apple graphics on top.
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