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And still most majority of kernel hacking is done by private people in their free time. No mention of virtually every other software I use everyday. Think of drivers, often made and improved AGAINST a company will, by reverse engineering closed sources.

Money have nothing to do with open source. Sure they help, but if a project is not followed it's not because of money incentives.

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That might have been the case 10 years ago but not today. According to G. Kroah-Hartmann, more than 80% of kernel contributors are full-time paid developers, the remaining 20% being spread among free-time contributors and companies who do not want to disclose their names. People contributing to gcc, mozilla or OpenOffice are all full-time paid developers funded by a company to do so.

Money is not everything, but it has a lot to do with everything, including open source. Linux would still have been a hobby operating system if a number of big players (Sun, IBM, etc) didn't get on the Linux bandwagon in the early 2000s.

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