[rglullis]

BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.

You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.

[saltcured]

I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.

It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

[rglullis]

I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?

[jemmyw]

From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.

[rglullis]

> nothing that requires human input is free.

TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.

[saltcured]

Of course we put labor into it. It's not some seance or wormhole communicating with the software dimension.

This is the way FOSS is meant to work. I got jobs where an employer was happy to run other people's FOSS software "for free", happy for me to contribute bugs/requirements/patches back upstream, and happy to release our own projects under FOSS licenses.

It is a win-win for all involved. That's the whole point of it.

[rglullis]

You seem to imply that work on FOSS projects is a second-class activity, meant to be done after companies and employers have secured their revenue sources.

This is like trickle-down economics for FOSS and it doesn't work.

[admash]

That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)

[rglullis]

You are right, I abused the hyperbole. The IBM investment was not the first thing that propelled Linux to the mainstream. I remember that in 1999 my university was already installing Red Hat with Gnome 1.0 on the workstations for the computer lab, which of course already implies that Red Hat already existed as a mature company trying to make money from support contracts.

But even if the data point is not good to support the argument, I don't think one could argue that Linux succeeded by "being free". If Linux was a "serious threat" in 1998, it was because there already companies looking into it and willing to make back it up financially to help its development.

[esseph]

The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort. (Just an example)

And prior to whatever IBM did in 2000, I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job.

[rglullis]

> The Software Creations BBS was not an amateur effort

Yeah, and it was a BBS ran and backed by a software development company that used it as a channel to promote and sell their software. IOW, they were not offering the infrastructure "for free".

> I already had a job deploying Linux and BSD systems in production at a corporate job

Which means that there was someone paying your employer to support it. Again, not doing it "for free".

I think you and the others responding to me are just trying to disprove the specifics of my comment but entirely missing the meat of the argument: I am far from being "a 27 year-old who just graduated business school", but I agree with GP said: people will not pay for digital services unless they absolutely have to, so companies that try to make a living by offering a quality service in exchange for payment will invariably lose to someone that offers their product "for free" but exploits their customers elsewhere.