Thankfully most of the corporate interests that have already seeped into Linux have been a net positive. If corporations remember the lessons of the 1990's, it will remain that way.
(In the 1990's businesses either had to develop and maintain their own operating system, or license it from someone else. Both routes are expensive. There were also collaborative efforts for larger operating systems, none of which seemed to reach positive conclusions since the businesses who owned the rights to the operating systems were ultimately in direct competition with each other. For whatever reason, the open source collaborative model used by Linux has been successful. In all probability it is because nobody "owns" Linux in the conventional sense.)
Corporate interests are not bad per se, you would have to point to something nefarious that it has led to. Most people seem to think corporate interest in Linux has made it better by raising the level of investment to the extent that we can use it on most commodity hardware.
On the minus side of the equation, large controversial changes, more often outside the kernel but still important nevertheless, do get pushed through by people who are employed at important companies.
If your fulltime job is Linux it does give you an ability to influence what happens that others who are earning their daily bread some other way lack. You can use that ability to ride over some objections.
For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS. I used to think this but I realise now that if it did, then it would become static and conformist. This is because the experience of using it would have to be stable and common so that all the users who don't care about Linux per se wouldn't have to keep relearning how to use it or at least would only need to relearn 1 way. So there would have to be the world linux distro, probably run by some bullying company that would keep app developers, hardware vendors in line.
We'd be complaining about it like we might about MS or Apple. I like Linux for the wrong reason - I like it because there's so much choice. Simplicity is about eliminating choice.
> For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS.
This is extremely worrying. There already is enough linux monoculture in critical network infrastructure due every manufacturer except Juniper seemingly putting their penguin eggs into one basket. I can only hope there will be some common sense brewing for the future before linux experiences major failure and Pluto's Kiss starts to feel a bit too real for comfort.
