[jamespo]

Are you too young to remember "the network is the computer"?

And of course this worked in reverse, when Netscape released their commercial webserver Microsoft rushed to give away IIS.

[pjmlp]

I started coding in the 80's and I remember how the UNIX market was afraid of Windows NT workstations, before they actually started losing market share to the free (beer) UNIX versions in form of BSD and GNU/Linux.