Last I checked, Torvalds wasn't getting billions of dollars from the DoD to install Linux on servers. That's a false comparison, and a lazy one at that.

Almost every government lab I've seen has a rule that says you aren't allowed to use free software in the lab. Everything was supposed to have a vendor that was responsible for it that you were paying.

Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.

And that is the reason Red Hat is making so much money: Whether it is free or not is not relevant but that you can pay a vendor who will fix your problems in production

That's interesting...

We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good.

This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.