For some time, this world was fully proprietary in Brazil and you had to pay big bucks for tools or resort to unlicensed copies (piracy). Since the second option was unavailable for the public sector and bigger companies, this created an horrible dependency on proprietary inferior software tools that took around a decade to heal. It is a good thing Linux was so successful in some many points of the stack.
An anecdata: a few years ago I bought something in a drugstore that was running a Linux desktop with DosBox running something in Clipper. I also saw Linux desktops accessing something running in Clipper, in apparently a DOS (virtual?) machine, remotely through telnet. Funny but somewhat ugly reality that is fortunately becoming extinct.
Things only got marginally different (better) when during the first decade of the 2000's systems started to go on-line, mostly with LAMP winning against ASP and then, more recently, with the advent of Android apps coupled with cloud services.