Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
I'm not in any way claiming that Linux can't be used commercially. I am merely arguing that it's not "essentially capitalist".
I took -- and take -- issue with the (your) cited wording that 'Linus could have extended Minix but he decided to make a non-commercial OS that was totally free, he doesn't talk about freedom as much as others like RMS and he is a multi-millionaire, but that wouldn't have happened if Linux was commercial.' This reflects confusion between the proprietary vs. open-source distinction, the one that actually matters, and an illusive and bogus 'commercial vs. free' one.
Minix was created as part of a project to teach OS design and licensed to help sell a text book. That's what I call an "essentially capitalist" OS where anyone can read the source.
The fact that it was written to sell a textbook would have been meaningless trivia if the code had been issued under an open-source licence, but the publisher would not permit Tanenbaum to do so, so it was not done. (That situation has been remedied in recent years.) What something was 'designed for' _is_ meaningless trivia. Linux is used to sell books all the time, and what the OS was 'designed for' doesn't signify. Anyhow, _please_ cease using the word 'commercial' when the appropriate concept is 'propretary'. This sort of error has confused outsiders for decades, and been responsible for pretty nearly all of the rubbish rhetoric about hippy flawwer-power software that we used to hear.
No-one buys Linux.
I do. So do you. Pretty much everything has acquisition cost, including Linux in all of its forms. Don't try to fast-talk me on this one. You'll lose.