But the secret of open source is that it was the same people (or at least the same job roles) who were previously writing proprietary software. Companies just decided that it made more sense to have them collectively, collaboratively work in public on infrastructure software than to pay a single vendor for closed-source code. It's not that hobbyists are implementing core OS scheduling primitives like cgroups, it's that the professional engineers doing that are now employed directly by end users like Facebook or Google instead of by vendors like SCO or Sun.
Can they? All pieces of software that are the core part of the Linux desktop (kernel, Xorg, GNOME, Firefox, etc) are backed by big corporations.
No one is saying that we don't need talented scientists writing and reviewing papers or organizing journals. The claim is that the structure of doing this through Elsevier doesn't make sense any more.
Gee, what if open academic publishing could also work, without the likes of Elsevier?
Plus, given that when folks like Darl McBride said "He can't have written an entire OS" they were clearly not thinking about just the Linux kernel, I think there's a solid argument for counting macOS and iOS too, both of which depend on the assumption that open-source code is of comparable quality to proprietary, commercially-developed code. Everything from their core kernel to the shell to the database for storing contacts (SQLite) is code developed in ways that the McBrides of the world said was untenable. That bumps it to almost 60%.
(Don't try me, I still have my Slashdot-honed debate skills.)
Please read this in the context of the analogy: the OS is the science, the UI is typesetting/distribution/etc.
As it happens I think that's actually directly analogous to the open access fight now. Universities stick with pricy journals not because those journals provide better typesetting or distribution (or science) but because those journals are the only way to get to existing papers. If Windows had never existed until today, nobody would switch to it; similarly, if Elsevier had never existed until today, nobody would start subscribing to them.
Or servers, or mobile devices in the form of Android phones. Desktop usage is only one many use cases for Linux.
But if we look at servers, there's a ton of Linux servers out there. Might be a better metric than computers that a small subset of programmers use. Linux accounts for >30% of this share and Unix like is >60%. Those are really important.
Also a lot of embedded systems run Linux.
Either way I think we pretty much agree. Linux is everywhere. Just not big on desktops. But huge everywhere else (which has a larger share of the computing resources in the world).
Much like with open-source software wasn't so much about it being free as changing the development model (you could see the source, send in patches, and have a direct discussion with the engineers who wrote that code), one of the more interesting changes is how much research progress now happens via preprints or even just blog posts. There is definitely a valuable role for journals as the gatekeepers of what research you should pay attention to and the facilitators of communication, but like account reps that insulate engineering teams from customers and help prioritize what's important, in practice they aren't working well enough any more to justify having them.
(And the implication, then, is that this work is hardly menial; you want a person actually familiar with your discipline to triage bugs or sort through preprints. And it turns out you're in a better spot to find or train up those people than the middlemen are.)