There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.

And who was developing the Internet until the 1990's? The government. Specifically, DARPA and NSF. And a bunch of universities, probably funded by government grants.

Sounds like Rosa Martinez might be getting back more than $870/mo worth. Even going all the way back to 1996, that's an average of about $40,000/mo per person.

What are you smoking? $500 million, divided by 80,000 people is an average of $6250 per person, total. Assuming they were all getting $870 per month, they were being paid for an average of a little over 7 months.

but isn't it all about the userspace, which is pretty much the same?

In general, you're correct. Apache (on, say, NetBSD)is generally as secure as Apache (on Linux). However, OpenBSD has reviewed a lot of the ported applications, and so Apache (on OpenBSD) should be better than other versions of Apache. That review may be done by other operating systems (e.g. the RedHat/Fedora version of Apache, if you get the RPM), but OpenBSD is famous for it.

I suspect neither of those would be desirable if you consider yourself a Web Intelligent Designer. :-)

Sorry, SMTP (e-mail) uses TCP (almost always port 25). Perhaps you mean SNMP (network management)? A typical home router doesn't normally use SNMP, but more expensive ones (Cisco, etc.) do.