I think the point is that if the Linux kernel "costs" say 4 billion to make, that it's perfectly within the capabilities of a company if they would see the value in doing so - which has been greatly reduced because Linux works so well for so many people and companies.
But if Walmart needed a kernel for some reason, and it would provide value to them, they could afford it, it's about a quarter's worth of profit. But, again, Linux would likely do anything they needed, and if it was missing something they could add it.
the monetary cost is misleading. you can't take 4 billion dollars and use it to hire developers for a year and then expect something equivalent to the linux kernel after a year. money doesn't actually translate on its own into valuable things - people have to actually do work to make that possible. and not every task is infinitely divisible such that it can be worked on in parallel by many hands.
the actual cost is in person-years of work, not dollars, and even then you can only speed up the time it takes so much by throwing money at the problem.
>money doesn't actually translate on its own into valuable things - people have to actually do work to make that possible.
This is highly unintuitive. I don't understand how Windows's Explorer (the file manager) has been for many years and is still to this day vastly inferior to Dolphin, a Linux file manager made for free by five Dutch guys or whatever. I can think of many other examples.
If anything, it seems like more money results in less quality, by way of some tragic sociological paradox. :p
when people make things because they want to, they make things that other people actually want to use. when capital directs people to make things, they do so for the purpose of creating more capital. we pretend that "making money" and "making something useful" are synonymous but they're not. look at advertising - an entire industry where nothing useful is produced but billions of dollars are spent simply manipulating people's wants and needs. at some scale, people stop being able to self-fund these projects - it's when that threshold is crossed that people start making what seem like truly bizarre decisions to hamstring the use-value of their own products, because they're instead trying to maximize their exchange value instead.
But if Walmart needed a kernel for some reason, and it would provide value to them, they could afford it, it's about a quarter's worth of profit. But, again, Linux would likely do anything they needed, and if it was missing something they could add it.