[jabl]

To an extent, I actually am. Redhat became successful because they went after and conquered the "replace expensive proprietary unix risc server with x86+Linux but still want a support contract for CYA reasons and that's how we do it in the enterprise world".

Ubuntu is wildly popular on desktops and in the cloud (and largely for good reasons, all the phone-home and marketing etc. aside, it's a solid and polished distro), but I expect a vanishingly small fraction of Ubuntu users actually pay a dime to Canonical. Now Canonical has been trying to monetize Ubuntu in various ways over the years, some better and some worse, but I do hope they succeed so that Ubuntu is long term sustainable.

[red-iron-pine]

Bingo.

There is no AIX or HP-UX in the wild anymore, at least not outside of niche or legacy deployments, because RHEL ate it up.

Every enterprise I've ever been at required official licenses and official escalation and support SLAs. By offering enterprise support and reasonable response times they became the de facto winner of the Unix enterprise world.

Ubuntu still reigns supreme for individual users, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to F500 companies.