🐧Linux é Grátis, Mas IBM Pagou $34 Bilhões Por Ele
Você pode baixar Linux de graça. Sempre pôde. Mesmo assim, a IBM pagou 34 bilhões de dólares pela Red Hat em 2019 - a maior aquisição de software da história. O produto? Contratos de suporte técnico pra um software que custa zero. --- Os números são surreais. 84% das mudanças de código no Linux em 2025 vieram de desenvolvedores pagos por empresas. Intel é a maior contribuidora, Google em segundo. A Linux Foundation arrecadou 311 milhões no ano passado, mas só 2.6% foi pro Linux em si - o resto financia 1.500 outros projetos de código aberto. --- A ironia máxima: mais de 65% dos computadores na nuvem da Microsoft rodam Linux. A mesma Microsoft cujo ex-CEO chamou Linux de 'câncer'. Amazon e Google passam de 90%. Os 500 supercomputadores mais rápidos do mundo? Todos rodam Linux. Cada celular Android tem Linux dentro. Um estudo de Harvard calculou que se todo software de código aberto desaparecesse, empresas gastariam 8.8 trilhões de dólares a mais por ano. É o maior projeto colaborativo de engenharia da história humana.
You can't buy Linux. It's free. Always has been. So IBM did the next best thing: it spent $34 billion buying Red Hat, a company whose entire business is selling tech support for this free software. Largest software acquisition in history. For support contracts on something anyone can download for $0. The "side project" story, while true, is maybe 5% of what actually happened since. Linux itself is managed by a nonprofit, the Linux Foundation. That nonprofit pulled in $311 million last year. Only $8.4 million of that (2.6%) actually went to Linux itself. The rest of the funds support ~1,500 other open source projects, events, and training. Every Fortune 100 tech company is a paying member. And here's who actually builds this "free" software now: 84% of the code changes to Linux in 2025 come from developers on corporate payroll. Intel is the biggest contributor. Google is second. Huawei, Oracle, AMD, and Meta all have engineers writing Linux code full-time. Over 1,780 companies pay people to work on it. The solo genius in a dorm room stopped being the real story around 1998. The wildest part: over 65% of Microsoft's cloud computers run Linux. Microsoft, the company whose former CEO once called Linux "a cancer," now runs more Linux than Windows on its own servers. Amazon and Google's clouds are even higher, both above 90%. A 2024 Harvard Business School study attempted to calculate how much companies would spend if all free, open-source software vanished tomorrow. The answer: $8.8 trillion more per year. 3.5x what they currently spend. And that number didn't even include operating systems like Linux. Linus Torvalds still personally approves every major code change. He makes about $1.5 million a year. He also built Git, the tool that powers GitHub (which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion). Two pieces of software the entire tech industry runs on, same guy. Linux started as 10,239 lines of code. It's now over 40 million. Every one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers runs it. 96% of the top million websites sit on it. Every Android phone has Linux inside it. That's roughly 3 billion devices in people's pockets. It's the largest collaborative engineering project in human history, free to use, funded by the same corporations it was supposed to replace.
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