If you develop in .NET, it's not surprising that you only have customers that run Windows. It would be odd that it was otherwise.
The fragment of a market that _can't_ run Windows is very small and irrelevant.
The portion of a market that _won't_ run Windows for you app, is not small, and relevant.
Keep in mind that most servers run Linux, so business software that doesn't run on Linux is a problem.

That could be true if you were just talking about desktop software. Other than MS Office, desktop software is not the largest kind in business.
The real money is in business software, that needs to run (at least partially) on servers. In that case, Mac is not relevant, and Windows is not a leader. There is money to be lost if you don't target multiple platforms.

Of course, you can run a successful company, even if you don't target the whole of the available market, but there are actual, relevant, missed opportunities when you target just MS Windows.

I agree that Linus is a luminary.
I don't agree that his opinion regarding UI is worth a damn.
I would be like taking fashion advice from a textile industry engineer.
His skills are orthogonal to UI, and his decisions were bad in the past (KDE!! WTF!?) .

I understand XFCE might be better suited to him, mainly because he won't need to learn new tricks.
For the general public, Gnome Shell or Unity are great, they are a lot easier to learn from scratch, more discoverable, and suited to actual newbies, a very important audience to take into account when you have a single digit marketshare.
For experts, they are also great, because they reward knowledge, are searchable, and save screen real estate.

Most importantly, they are designed by specialists, with the user in mind, and actual tests, with actual users.
A kernel developers opinion is not that relevant here.

That would be going too far.
You know that muslims can't be portrayed as the good guys, in the news, in games, and of course not in comics.

Whoooshhhh!!!

So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.

I didn't say they were worth the paper they are printed on. I just said they were worth more than US dollars.

How do you measure revenue? In US dollars?
In US business, US dollars are important.
For a Chinese business, chinese eyeballs might be more important than US dollars, strategically.

Excuse me.
I am an atheist, and I wouldn't ever use a Transporter.
Philosophically, it's impossible to tell whether you get actually transported, or you just die and get replaced by someone who thinks they were transported. Both cases look the same from the destination point, so you could never know for sure.

You lack perspective.
My mom learned French when she was young, because she studied chemistry, and French was the language of science back then, from our perspective. And she's not even sixty.
The world changed. Right now, English is the language of businesses.
In the future, it doesn't have to stay that way.
In the US, you will need to learn Spanish if you want to reach the fastest growing markets. In just a few decades, Spanish might become the first mother language in most of the United States, or at least most of those financially relevant.

English is the language of businesses, because the US is where businesses are, they are the main buyer of stuff, oil is the number one commodity, and it sells in dollars, Wall Street rules the world.

If all that were to change, English would lose much of its appeal as a world language. After all, businesses will speak whatever their best clients want them to speak. We need to plan ahead, taking into account what we think the future will be like.

Are you so shallow enough not to buy a product or service from a company that could not speak English?
I live in Latin America. If we want to export to the US or some parts of Europe, we need to speak English.
If we want to do business with the Chinese, English helps, but Chinese can be better. If anything, speaking their language means you care enough about them particularly, enough to invest a significant part of your resources in them.

Well, Tiananmen is a big issue when it comes to censorship.
The accepted fact is that we know the truth, and poor, oppressed Chinese people do not, due to censorship.
If it turns out we, free people, believed a lie all these years, it would mean our information is just as doctored as what the Chinese get.
That would mean that the rulers of the west are not better than the guys who build the Great Chinese Firewall, it would only mean that the West methods, mainly propaganda, are better than more direct ones.

Google is in this for business. Each browser they support costs them money, and adds a small amount of HTML and a possible point of failure.

The issues you talk about are due to the high cost of vendor lock in, when the vendor you choose is not the winner in the field, of just abandons products. It's not resonable to expect Google to pay for some of those costs.

choosing the wrong proprietary vendors is abandonment.

He said he was a devout christian. Their religion tells them not to care whether something is natural or good by its own. What matter is what the scriptures say, or what they can read them to say in the case of evangelists, or what the pope-...-priest/tradition says, in the case of catholics.

It's easy.
The BSD license gives other distributors permissions to repackage your code, and give nothing back but a written mention.
The GPL does not allow that, distributors need to show code. If they fail to, they fall out of the license, and under simple copyright infringement.

There's nothing to prove, the GPL protects against freeloaders, and the BSD does not. By design.

What they do is unacceptable. They are not trustworthy.
It's not reasonable to install a software in your phone, giving it access to your personal data and data plan, when you know that its publishers like to spend other peoples money, no matter the purpose.

It could be argued whether the victims deserve it or not, but the publishers are not to be trusted.