No thanks. Even if I get all of the achievements they'll just add more achievements to get me to buy new slashdot downloadable content.

I don't understand what you mean by "... those companies have already made it clear what their terms and conditions are and we won't compromise."

I work for a company that sells software (and support contracts for that software) for Linux (Red Hat RHEL and SuSE SLES). The user-space ABI is fairly stable. We build on two platforms RHEL 3 and RHEL 5 and run on five RHEL 3, 4, 5 and SuSE SLES 9 and 10.

Yes, the kernel driver interfaces change more frequently -- but that affects people who write device drivers, not user-space applications.

I'm fairly certain that the main reason there aren't more commercial applications on Linux is market share. All of the other reasons (e.g. ease of install, attitudes of the community) have fallen by the wayside as the Linux desktop and server experience have improved.