Maybe not to a linux puppet, whose arguments fly all in the face of reality.
But to rational people it's nothing more than proof their empire, possibly illegally constructed, is begining to fall apart. Why? Because 'free' software can't sustain itself, and 99% of linux users aren't willing to pay anything for it, nor do they contribute anything back.
You insist on viewing the issue through the lens of a software maker. You're absolutely right: spending even one dollar to create something that is to be given away makes no sense as a business model.
But that is not what the problem looks like to a hardware vendor. Having an OS is a prerequisite to selling hardware. I gotta have one, or I don't get to sell any boxes. We already had the war about every hardware vendor having his own high-margin proprietary OS, and the IT managers won. UNIX it shall be. So here I am stuck with a huge expense maintaining my own flavor of UNIX, which I can't make any profit on because UNIX is UNIX (that's not what my brochures say, but the IT managers can only be fooled so much). UNIX-based OS's are a profitless commodity product, except for the services I can sell around them.
So here comes this linux thing, where I still get to sell my box and my services, but instead of footing the whole bill myself for my flavor of UNIX, I just chip into the pot, and we all use the same thing and compete on the basis of hardware features and services, which is in fact what we're doing now anyway.
The hardware vendors do not care whether the linux development effort makes money. They already have a UNIX development effort that doesn't. If they can shuck that, and replace it with something that costs less or ties up fewer assets, they're in.
So here's IBM Global Services "partnering" with Red Hat to handle all the sub-$250K linux consulting deals they find. IBM didn't want the damned things anyway. And for this they get an operating system that actually moves iron. Not that much yet, but this is a much better deal than funding AIX.
If you only look at the software economics, you can't see what's driving this.