I kinda agree as far as the desktop but having IE opensource and running on Linux would change that a bit.
On the server end of things I agree. But I'd say Linux matured about 24 months ago in that regard. Today, it's much different than it was even back then and certainly very different from when we first ran across Linus in 1991.
I should hope so. That was a year before linux-0.01 (which was labeled as a pre-alpha, not production) was released.