to the ability to hire any of a "an army" of past or current kernel developers to help solve my problems or do my custom development

Aha, you mean like redhat and IBM did, where there are now "kernel developers" who can't find their way out of a wet paper bag, and spend more time arguing with paying customers back-and-forth in redhat's bug system, because they don't have a clue where the problem is? When you have some spare time, please do peruse https://bugzilla.redhat.com/index.cgi, in order to have a look at what your presumption looks like in the real world...

to the ability for people to just write "yet another filesystem"

...Because we need more beta filesystems instead of not having to worry about data integrity, right? And because it's just too much fun to be solving the same problem over and over and over again, but never quite get it right? So that for example, on Linux, we can have things like these:

/var/log/messages.1:2267:(redacted) kernel: VxVM vxio V-5-0-1266 Subdisk disk_42f7-01 block 108279824: Uncorrectable write error
/var/log/messages.1:2270:(redacted) kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on VxVM14000
/var/log/messages.1:2411:(redacted) kernel: VxVM vxio V-5-0-1266 Subdisk disk_42f8-01 block 108003336: Uncorrectable write error

...which ext3, which was on this Veritas disk group, wasn't able to recover, let alone detect. In the 21st century. Because community. I last saw a problem like this on Solaris ten years ago, since it has been a solved problem since 2006 there. Bryan is correct, I do have clean water, and even modern medical care facilities!

The most important part of the success and value of Linux is that community. Without the community, it'd have little to offer over any number of other kernels that are better in some areas, worse in others.

The two of us (both with several decades of UNIX system administration experience under our belt) just wasted one hour trying to get a simple NFS share to work on RHEL 6.5, and it still doesn't work, with mount(2) returning "incorrect mount option" without saying which; and that was with us carefully following both redhat's official documentation and many examples on the InterNet.

Because, you know, man. Like, Linux! And stuff.

I have zero interest in how much of a community Linux has (99.99% of them are former Microsoft(R) Windows(R) users, with the corresponding mentality to match).

When I use a computer, I use it to get work done. All I wanted to do in the aforementioned NFS fiasco is to test my code, so I could get work done.

On Solaris / illumos, all I do is

zfs set sharenfs=on pool/filesystem

and then I access that on any client, without even worrying about mounting it, like so:

ls -l /net/nfs_server/filesystem

without caring if it's NFS 2, NFS 3, or NFS 4 (like I have to on Linux, whose implementation of NFS is so dumb that it actually offloads that on to the system administrator to worry about)[1][2].

I could have had my tests long done and the code deployed by now. I could have had work done if it weren't for that same community not having a freaking clue how to make things JustWork(SM), and if it weren't for the

"because, like, you know, man. Linux!"

[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

[2] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...