[hga]

Counterexample: FTP Software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software). A group of friends decided they wanted to start a company, they realized that with some effort they could turn an IP mostly stack for PCs into a full featured TCP/IP stack and did quite well for a while. Then again, the messes discussed in "Fate" section could be see as suggestive.

Additional details on its fate: the company's sales function got so screwed up people started contacting the president to get a copy (and don't laugh too much, this put Xerox in dire straits and improving this was a if not the most important goal of Mark Hurd when he became HP's CEO). And I was less reliably told that at one point they completely lost their source code repository.

But the idea certainly wasn't forced, full TCP/IP on MS-DOS was a killer app at the time.