[ghshephard]

You are conflating, "Closed" with "Wide Availability of zero-cost toolchains."

Windows was as open as open can get, in the sense of, "Do I need to ask anyone's permissions to create, install, and sell a binary for this platform?"

[dnautics]

a fair criticism. It was de facto closed. Keep in mind during the 90s, the internet was limited (for quite a bit of that time I didn't even have a 2400 baud modem). It wasn't until my second year in college that my friend introduced me to linux, and I still didn't actively start using linux until 2006-ish (I spent 1999-2003 in BeOS and 2004-2006 in FreeBSD)

i guess the part of my complaint that had the most to do with 'closed' was the MFC/developer licensing part. I knew enough to know there were APIs lying underneath that weren't exposed to me that I could do awesome stuff with if I was able to see it. At least with BeOS it "felt" like the most important part of the API were exposed - and with linux I know that they are in principle, even though I never use them.