Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.

What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).

Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.

Which doesn't matter, precisely because those entities have no ownership over Linux and thus no ability to enshittify the product.

Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.

(I used to work with the Xen folks.)

They said service, not software.