I was pitching an Open Source developer tools startup around here at this time. VCs laughed in my face since there's no business model in OSS or in developer tools.
Looks like there's a bunch of OSS companies doing well now, with their business model being getting paid for a hosted version of their software. Posthog is a good example.
This was around that time. That's my point. In the valley companies like ours got funding for OSS and developer tools at that time (Xamarin, Github, etc.). But in other places it took 5+ years for the dime to drop...