It comes down to who's in charge, and what their motivations are.

Google's motivations include learning everything about you, and how to serve you more ads.

Linus' motivations include writing solid code and flipping people the bird.

It's not just about the current situation, either.

When Linus finally goes to the bitbucket in the sky, there are so many companies, organizations and private individuals with an incentive to keep Linux operating and free from backdoors, we can somewhat rest easy at night.

But with Chromium/Chrome - there are only a handful of organizations in the world that can keep up with the rate of patches coming out of Google. Google de-facto controls the direction of Chromium.

I'm not saying that's worse than the alternative. Maintaining something like that is a hell of a lot of work. Unfortunately, things have become so complex and monolithic that there are only a handful of viable browsers.

At least two of them have source available, so we can start over if we absolutely have to.

Linux is not dominated by a single company. Developers working for many companies contribute heavily to it, but as long as Linus Torvalds is at the helm, it is unlikely to be dominated by any one of them. So you don’t have to worry about the Linux Kernel tracking every keystroke to harvest data for adverts.

And the OS kernel monoculture is to the open source world's detriment. I think it's fantastic that Fuchsia is going to give Linux a run for its money: Fuchsia is fundamentally better architected in numerous ways than Linux is.

Dominant on server or generally? Windows is pretty big generally, and it isn't obscure enough on servers that I don't have to deal with vendors daily who require me to inter-operate with windows.

The kernel isn't trying to adhere to an open protocol. It's defining it's own to match ever evolving hardware.

Ultimately it's about the client driving the protocol. We don't want that. It means there will be only one client.

We have an ISO C standard and many different C compilers. We have a standard for C++, and many different C++ compilers. With things like Matlab and Go, you have an implementation. There is no standard. The implementation defines the standard. And there is only one implementation. That's not good for anybody.

If Linux was owned and controlled by Google, I think it would be a lot more controversial.