Linux’s author called it a hobby too small to matter, yet it runs most servers.
On a newsgroup in August 1991, Linus Torvalds announced it modestly. “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu),” he wrote. In 2019 IBM paid about $34 billion for Red Hat, a company built on selling support for Linux.
Linux on Brandseum