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).