Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.
Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.
There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.
A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free.
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
In many ways, I am very happy about the whole Linux commercial market because the commercial market is doing all these things that I have absolutely zero interest in doing myself.
Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.
All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.