You've been a great example to me and many others, in doing open source, in taking a principled stance (even if I subtly disagree with some of your principles) and also in showing that yes, it's totally possible to found a company with an incomprehensible business model, grow it, have it contribute lots and lots to awesome open source, and somehow despite all the free work and the incomprehensibilities, flip it for a profit. One day I hope to do the same and all of HN will be like "huh?"
I'm surprised you're surprised by this, considering that you have contributed much to the personalization of such matters. The personal "psychologization" of complex social dynamics is pretty much the trademark of many of your talks. If you find psychological explanations attractive, why are you surprised when others do, too?
Later on when I had more say in what systems things ran on, I'd reach for Linux because it was easier. It was good enough. I could easily run it at home too, and it ran on cheap hardware.
I sometimes wonder how much that usability factor played a role...
Though AWS seems to be doing fine as a business, so maybe this theory about usability isn't so great.
It's now faster than GNU/Linux on the same hardware and has been for the past ten years.
I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC microprocessors during that same period -- a time when the only other open source Unix was operating under a legal cloud from AT&T. It seems likely that these forces played a greater role than a twentysomething engineer shooting his mouth off on Usenet...