Kernel contributor says Linux community 'can be intimidating'

Sure it's intimidating. As the usability increased, "learnability" simply vanished

Misleading title. I had hoped to read more about why and how it was intimidating. Not that the article didn't hold some interest, but really, try to keep on topic with your title.

It's own collosal failure? What a load of negative anti-linux propoganda, from an obvious Micro$oft or Apple FanBoy lol.

Linux is only increasing in popularity, just look at how many desktops/laptops/netbooks are shipped with the Linux alternative today. Quite a few governments have already rolled over to Linux (google it), amazing for a product that has very little commercial backing / Marketing, unlike it's competition who have billions of dollars and thousands of employees invested into them.

Dead, what a load of bs!

Yes, thats the classic linux argument, it's used in the mobile market, supercomputers, and servers, yes and some rendering farms.

All those are applications or uses for Linux OS, because it's a 'free' component that has been value added into a commercial product.

Ofcourse, if you're a phone manufacturer, and you are offered the components that make up the phone for free, and you can still sell you're product for the same price, the manufacturer of that product profits from FOSS.

But in any of those models you suggest, where is the mechanism that allows FOSS to DIRECTLY profit from FOSS ?

That is the fundamental issue holding back FOSS, or OS in general the developers are doing all their hard work on products that others happily profit on, and you consider that a good thing.

Sure FOSS/Linux has saved Google millions, or mabey billions in development costs, and software in general that they use.

So the shareholders, and executives of google can put another million into their personal wealth.

Until you find a model that works to reward the actual programmers of FOSS technologies, applications and you have to resort to putting in huge amounts of hard work writing code to make others rich and ensures you DO NOT get rich, (except the very very lucky few).

Take the FSF for example, they are a registered charity, their very existane relies upon the goodness of the likes of INTEL, giving them 'donations'.

So the FSF cannot even develop an acceptable business model to work under. The best you can hope for is to be employed by Red Hat and become one of many IT workers, which is not what you want to do if you are a programmer.

Programmers like to be paid too, why should everyone else profit from their efforts, everyone except themselves.

So in that respect, over the last 20ish years FOSS have been around, it's still very insignificant, and only thrives where it's a source of cheap software to be hidden in a back room, or under a mobile phone UI.