> Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ?

With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened.

As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.

We can agree to disagree on that point. Redhat is basically the universally supported platform in the enterprise. You want to call inf or a support case on that SAS HBA? You need to be running Redhat. You have a flaky NIC? Redhat. New Fibre Channel HBA? Redhat.

And rightly so, the vendor on the other end needs to know they've got an actual live person to work with on troubleshooting. Without Redhat I have no doubt Linux would still be alive and well, but it would NEVER have gotten the foothold it has in the enterprise today (coming from someone who worked at one of those hardware vendors back in the day and tried to push for support of other distributions).

I lived through these times, trying to port and support major server applications on Linux. Your thoughts on this are entirely inconsistent with my experience.