The IETF, which had no centralized authority, or legal foundation, nevertheless became the incubator within which the standards were grown. Interop became the forum where the interoperability between implementations and devices was tested, debugged and proven.
People make money when they create something others want badly enough to buy it.
Linux is not a charity case. It produces useful stuff or it vanishes. Microsoft is a mechanism for creating, distributing and servicing software. It has been extremely successful. One could almost say it got started with free software.