1. GNU has been going for nearly a couple of decades - Linus didn't magic an OS out of thin air. The modern equivalent is the articles written about Safari that suggest Apple did the same.

2. Nor was was Linux for home brews - Red Hat, the commercial distro, had emerged as the current leader for both businesses and nerds, with Apache (written by the ASF, which still had strong commercial roots) and to a lesser extent Samba (which I guess back then was still relatively uncommercial, so I give the article that).

3. As a Linux consultant at the end of 1998, I started on 75 Australian dollars an hour, because I knew Unix despite having no access to RISC systems. Utterly useless? I think not.