Well they certainly don't need, nor have needed proprietary *NIX boxes for quite some time. Whether they do or not I don't know. I would be willing to bet that a few of the mailing lists might have some proprietary NIX boxes in the mix, but only because this type of stuff is so open and hosted by whoever wants to host it. If the UNI has an old Solaris box sitting in the corner doing nothing why not use it as a news archive? Of course they could throw Sparc/Linux on it. The whole point of Free software is it can be used anywhere, even on proprietary systems. If that wasn't the point there wouldn't be a GCC for Sparc/Solaris, for HP-UX, for AIX, for Windows, etc.