But in all honesty, let’s do a bit of math:

Microsoft makes $70 billion per year from Azure, and 40% of Azure servers are on Linux. That seems to imply $30 billion come from Linux hosting. And these are the guys who make Windows. When your rival makes 30/200ths of their total yearly revenue just hosting YOUR servers for people, I’d say you’re not going anywhere any time soon.

Also, Amazon EC2 is currently at half a million active Red Hat servers. Which bring in about $10 billion in revenue for Amazon.

And that’s just two companies. When the revenue generated by services built on top of GNU’s projects dip below $1 billion worldwide, I’ll lend an ear to someone telling me they are dying.

But using money as a proxy for activity, $40 billion dollars (at the very least, and across only two companies) all say GNU is bustling.