You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
> if the linux kernel became paid
Like another comment I just replied to, [0] this conflates software freedom with price. Proprietary forks are often shunned as a lot of people care that the software they use have a Free and Open Source licence. This happens whether or not they're made available to download free of charge.
Also, the Linux kernel uses the GPLv2 licence, so non-Free forks are not permitted.
> they don't do it for charity.
Right, of course. When business interests can align with the interests of Free and Open Source projects, that's a good thing.
> You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
Yeah, I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions. But the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid, as the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free.
Well, no, they'd use the other Free and Open Source Unix-like kernels, in particular FreeBSD. If we woke up tomorrow and there were no Free and Open Source kernels around at all, we would of course want to create one. This is why the Hurd kernel was started, after all. [0]
There are already various non-Free kernels out there. Windows is the obvious one, but also HP-UX and Oracle Solaris. There are also some freely available proprietary kernels, such as Menuet 64.
> you will never find a lack of free compilers, OS's, programming languages etc
It's fun to dabble in those fields, but doing serious work in compiler engineering or operating systems is just that: serious work. Major FOSS projects are very often powered largely by paid developers with specialized skills.
> since companies wants a free OS for their servers they would start to contribute to whatever OS that looks the most promising, we would have another free big OS for most service needs running very quickly
Hopefully we would, yes.
> I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions
Not really, no. The list includes the Linux kernel, MySQL, Postgres, OpenJDK, GCC, LLVM, Chromium, and Firefox. Those aren't mere exceptions, and they're not the kind of software that can be achieved on a have-a-go basis.
> the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid
Right, as I've been saying, business interests can align with those of a FOSS project, hopefully benefiting both so that sustainable progress can be made.
> the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free
It's not clear what you're saying here. You're right that most paid software work is not released as FOSS. A lot of paid software work is on software that isn't intended for use by software developers, so they're never going to be the user anyway.