Hmmm

Let's admit the dirty, little secret.

The FSF didn't accomplish anything noteworthy even with Linus' blind and aggressive campaign until the major competitors of Microsoft decided that dumping money and people into "free software" projects that competed with Microsoft was a good way to get revenge on Bill Gates for killing their old "centralized server computing equals high profits" model. Really. Name a project that made it big (say, 2% of the market) without back channel funding from IBM or SUN or Oracle.