Personally, it's amusing at best. In the same way as the girl in Jurassic Park using "Unix" to hack the system.

That being said, I still give mad props for the development that occurred during that era.

I think someone just misread what the article says and missed the 'not' in 'need not be expensive'.

You've missed the second part of that sentence - 'UNIX can run on hardware costing as little as $40,000'. The photo is the Finnish hacker making it work on a computer that cost a fraction of that, while drinking a beer. It's a play on the hold my beer meme.

I think you should really ask around about product usage scenarios especially in Redhat/SUSE scenes. Linux is either same price or more expensive than Windows.

I think you say Minix was better but let me remind that it's creator himself says it was created for a very different purpose and still does it well. Its version 3 runs whole Intel World so it may have even "won"

I worked in TV industry and I knew some very high end studios. The amazingly expensive software they use needs a very reliable system without any kind of vendor lock in. They choose RHEL or SUSE on tested, certified hardware. OS price is just a small detail, like coffee machine supplies.

I have worked with very high end Microsoft Windows servers too. Did you know that their browser default homepage is MSN, not about:blank and it actually triggered Flash ActiveX install? I begun to see Windows like abuse of Dave Cutler's kernel. No less.