I'm not sure about that. For example, if Linux weren't free, but was instead developed by some giant corporation created around it, we'd perhaps have another letter in the FAANG acronym (FLAANG?), and thousands more very high paying jobs.
But aren’t Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google themselves heavily reliant on things like Unix/Linux? I can imagine a world where all their services exist only as clunky Microsoft offerings that have no rivals except maybe on niche competitor platforms like Mac (pre-OS X)
No, they'd just pay for licences of the commercial UNIX to the uber-global-Unix-vendor company (say something like Redhat, only 100x bigger, because it's not giving away the OS for free), in the same way they for example pay for CPUs to the uber-global-CPU-vendor (i.e. Intel or AMD).
You don't even need to imagine what would be this large UNIX vendor: Sun was the king of UNIX in the late 90s, and in large part it failed because of competition from open source Linux, which benefited Google, Apple, Amazon, and MS.
Yeah I was thinking about that example, but wasn't their agenda to tie Solaris to their expensive hardware (whereas Redhat is purely a software company)? And the whole appeal of Linux was - get a "serious" UNIX on a commodity no-brand hardware? I don't know these parts of history that well, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
