About this specific question
The vast majority of questions asked on this site are technical questions from people who use or manage unix systems. Most of them are “how do I do this”, with a minority of “how does this work” (generally with fairly direct practicality, i.e. the answer leads to better understanding of how to do things).
We do accept a few non-technical questions, for example about the history of Unix and Unix-like systems. Such questions represent a tiny portion of the site. So questions relating Linux and business are not intrinsically off-topic.
Now topic is not the only measure of the scope of a site, there is also audience. The audience of this site corresponds with the bulk of the topic: it's people who use and manage unix systems. The audience is people who do things with unix systems (other than programming, which is the realm of Stack Overflow). While administrators may sometimes be involved in business decisions, the audience is by and large not involved in business aspects.
The expertise for business decision would be in a community of people who make business decisions. For a question that's borderline to begin with, the bar is higher. A borderline question has to work hard to be accepted.
The question at hand is not a good Stack Exchange to begin with: it's broad, meandering, unfocused. On a site about business, such a question might be salvaged into something answerable. On a technical site like ours, this question is widely off the mark. While there is a hint of topicality, this question does not and cannot meet our expectations.
I don't completely agree to call this question “totally off-topic”, but off-topic it is. And it definitely is “non-constructive”.
On the more general issue
- cost of adoption by business
This is fundamentally a business question, best asked to people interested in business (which the audience here generally isn't).
- questions about free software or open source philosophy
- questions related to the open source model ("How does RedHat stay solvent?")
These are off-topic. The site is about unix, it isn't about free software. Besides, speaking by experience, most of these questions are thinly-disguised (if at all) rants for or against open source.
- historical questions ("Where did the idea of one tool for one purpose come from?")
We do have a few such questions.
As an extra note, the FAQ needs to be updated to explain our expectation, since this is not described there.
The FAQ does not exhaustively list all the types of questions that are accepted on the site, nor does it exhaustively list all the types of questions that are rejected on the site. The F in FAQ stands for “frequent”: the FAQ lists the common cases.