October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors and “Chief GNUisance” of the GNU project. He is responsible for innumerable contributions to the free software movement, setting its guiding principles, organizing political action, and directly contributing to a flourishing free software ecosystem. The majority of Stallman’s political activity has been of priceless value to society at large.
But if each corporation forked their own kernel, after a few years of customizing the code to their needs, they would each be developing their own operaging system so all software would only run on company systems and would not be compatible with customer’s systems.
No, their derivatives are not running on top of another person’s OS, they are themselves the OS. Hardware doesn’t make itself compatible with Linux, Linux makes itself compatible with hardware (by using or creating drivers). Those other companies do as well (or own the hardware stack as well, like Cisco).