Linux and *BSD have completely changed the storage market; they are the core of so many storage products, allowing start-ups and established vendors to bring new products to the market more rapidly than previously possible.
Almost every vendor I talk to these days have their systems built on top of these and then there are the number of vendors who are using Samba implementations for their NAS functionality. Sometimes they move on from Samba but almost all of version 1 NAS boxen are built on top of Samba.
There is a massive debt owed to the community and sometimes it is not quite as acknowledged as it should be.
So next time you have a vendor in; make sure you ask the question…how many developers do you have submitting code into the core open-source products you are using? What is your policy for improving the key stacks that you use?
Now, I probably wouldn’t reject a product/company that did not have a good answer but I’m going to give a more favourable listen to those who do.