[ncmncm]

I was there.

It was a lark. It certainly wasn't "sponsored". The dot com collapse was still to come. Nobody had any expectation of it changing anything, or getting refunds. At the time there was no possibility of getting an XPS13 with no OS, never mind with Linux supported. It got some attention for Linux, which practically nobody had ever heard of before they saw the picket signs. Linux didn't own server farms. There weren't server farms, unless you count racks of Sun pizza-boxes owned by whoever had software on running on them.

I guess you had to be there.