I discovered Linux back in 1995. At the time, I was working for a datacenter that used SGI Irix, and I had a similar conversation with my manager about using GNU/Linux instead of SGI's proprietary offering. She said, "we don't want to because we need a company to be accountable, which offers service, et al." At the time, there really wasn't too much in the space (I think RedHat showed up a few years later).
It is interesting to see how far it has come. Right now, I'm using Firefox under Ubuntu Linux to compose this comment. My Android phone is running embedded Linux. As you say, it's all over the place!
A few years later I wound up reading Eric S. Raymonds' "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and was blown away by the concept of open source in general. Up to that point, I kept running into naysayers, who maintained that open source was inherently insecure and there is no way one could make money with it.
Here, Raymond turns those specious arguments on their respective sides:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
RE: Linux Took Over the Web, Voluntaryism is Taking Over the World