[ThrowawayR2]

> Free software made cheap, network centric computing feasible.

Anybody remember the dot-com boom? Sun Microsystem's silly "The Network Is The Computer." ads? No? Linux wasn't even a blip on the radar back then at the enterprise level.

> In a world where Windows was dominant and you had to pay a per cpu licensing fee, would companies be trying to put everything on the web, or would they create more apps that ran locally with some network based syncing?

Um, obviously yes? The fact that Sun and the other UNIX server vendors and Oracle other server software vendors were charging various fees for their OS and software, on a per server or per CPU basis, did nothing to put the brakes on the dotcom boom. Network-centric computing took off well before free software became the buzzword of the mid to late '00s.

[regularfry]

Linux itself might not have been (although I'd challenge that if I could remember dates a bit better); Apache and Perl certainly was.

[pjmlp]

In 2000 we were delivering UNIX software into production on Aix, Solaris and HP-UX boxes, my employer at the time did not consider either GNU/Linux or BSD fit for the quality standards we expected from a standard UNIX, although we did use them on some internal servers, including our builds.