Yes. That is exactly true. When Oracle started working on Linux it was only useful for print servers - and I created a white paper for Larry analyzing its short

Yes. That is exactly true. When Oracle started working on Linux it was only useful for print servers - and I created a white paper for Larry analyzing its shortcomings (lots of functionality missing from the kernel.) So we, along with IBM, Sun, HP, and others, committed tens of millions in resources to making Linux an actual competitor to Windows. And we kept improving it until Bill made enough concessions, and then we stopped. But by that time Linux had been turned into a real OS, and over the next few years it became a "success story" for open source. But that misunderstands the reality of the hundreds of people we had assigned to make it work and to turn Red Hat into a real company. After that, it could be argued that we stayed involved in open source in order to keep it from succeeding too much as part of quietly negotiated side agreements.