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by mikekchar 3798 days ago
I'm not the original poster, but I find it slightly humorous at the incredulity of not running open source software anywhere. 15 years ago nobody would have batted an eyelid.

Back in the "dark days", I worked for a couple of Microsoft Certified Partners. One of the things they all had in common was a "no open source" policy. I wasn't even allowed to run emacs as my editor. GPL was explicitly "evil" and even more permissive licenses were "evil enough". Hell, I had to use Visual Source Safe for version control! I would have killed for RCS, let alone something like Subversion.

And, no, not a single Linux box, or even BSD system to be found. Every single server was running Windows. I remember noticing strange network traffic one time and, lacking the tools in Windows, booted up Knoppix and diagnosed the problem -- a former employee had set up a program on an idle machine to forward the source code for our software outside the company. I couldn't tell the network admins how I had found the problem because it was more than my job was worth to admit to having used GPL software on the premises.

Of course, I don't work for companies like that any more. In fact, I'm gratified to discover that they are so rare that nobody believes they could possibly exist. In my current job, apart from 3 SaaS products (Github, Trello and Slack), every single tool I use is open source. I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming...