No one knows more about the Linux operating system than its creator, Linus Torvalds, and the founder of the largest Linux company, Bob Young of Red Hat. So I tracked them down at Comdex and asked them to answer your questions for you. A lot of these so-called big guys in particular have been burned by operating systems in the past.
Nobody wants to touch operating systems.
The kernel is kind of scary to mess around with, and there just aren't many developers willing to do it. We've seen Linux users grow from 1,000 to 10 million, but the number of people working on the kernel has grown from maybe 100 to 200. And remember, the license prevents them from going too far. Everything they do has to be open source. Any competitor can then come along and grab that code and add it to their version of the system.