I remember when the Free Software movement really started to make inroads into the corporate world, which in my circles was the late 90s / early 2000s.

It was like a revelation.

No longer were we tied to inflexible, command-and-conquer style platforms. We could fix bugs ourselves, instead of waiting for years for vendors to maybe fix the bugs we diligently reported.

We could distribute our own libraries and packages in minutes, with licenses of our own choice. There was no corporate gatekeeper standing in the way. (But what of security, you ask? Look at Lenovo and Superfish ... that was a MITM attack produced by the supposed gatekeepers).

Now it seems things have come full circle, and a younger generation of developers is discovering, once again, that writing software for closed, proprietary systems is a mug's game.

Only now, those platforms seem even more strongly entrenched, courtesy the mobile duopoly and web monopoly.