Well, Linux really is just like a traditional product were the user pays to get their get their use cases supported. Except they’ve short-circuited the whole paying thing to where users directly hire people for the work (for the most part).
The users in this case are big companies. Companies pay developers directly to get features or hardware supported, developers which then send patches to the kernel team, or are a part of the kernel team (very short version).
The rest of us are just freeloaders. Hope that clears it up.