Yeah, it's worth remembering that at the time a compiler cost $10k+, an OS $1000s/year - you couldn't work on OS or compiler work unless you worked for a big hardware company - a whole lot of interesting work was locked away from most programmers
I didn’t start programming until a few years later, but for sure by 2002, it seemed to me a given that compilers were free. It was my impression that stuff like Borland was niche and that serious stuff like Java and C were free.
Not saying you are wrong, just your comment surprised me. Maybe I have a revisionist memory or maybe those intervening 3 years were quite transformational in the industry.
Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
As MSFT partner, we also started our voyage to port the GUI frontends into the newly introduced .NET.
We used Red-Hat Linux internally for our CVS server, MP3 music shares and Quake lan parties.
That is how seriously we look at Linux in 2002.
Does Perl and Apache (as in httpd, not the foundation) counts?
They are shipped in many enterprisy software at those time.
., and BIND. NTP, Sendmail. They are all opensource and predates that.
But yeah imo you're closer to right than not, though Microsoft licenses were still fairly expensive.
Commercial access to Unix source was still many thousands of dollars, the whole SCO debacle was an attempt to stop free OSs from being a thing
Many of us who had grown up from the mainframe era wanted to write compilers, work on OS's etc etc it was a hard thing to do (esp. outside the US) before the late 80s, cheap commodity hardware let a thousand flowers bloom
(That's not the biggest flaw in the essay, of course. It made predictions, some of which turned out to be comically wrong. The true parts of it weren't new, and the new parts of it weren't true.)