The flip side of this is that you have to keep up with breaking changes all the time. I've developed numerous in house apps that run on linux, and it is hard to

The flip side of this is that you have to keep up with breaking changes all the time. I've developed numerous in house apps that run on linux, and it is hard to keep up with every minute details that changes in all parts of such a system. It is exceedingly hard to justify that you have to spend a day figuring out what they changed in gtk that now makes the text appear a bit different, or why the init.d script that has never had a problem now sometimes fail to stop the service etc. ISVs, at least small ones, simply cannot keep up with the frequent external changes on such platforms, and the fewer people there are developing applications, in-house, open source, proprietary or what not, less people will use that platform.