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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

2002 was before the tipping point, IMO. Open-source software existed, but wasn't always taken seriously. Linux was still widely perceived as being a hobbyist OS unsuitable for "real" applications. A lot of the Internet still ran on Windows and commercial UNIX servers.

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By 2002 I was at Arbor Networks, shipping security software to tier-1 ISPs, and if we'd shipped it on a commercial Unix (let alone Windows) people would have looked at us like we had 2 heads. The writing was on the wall by end of the first dot com boom.

In 2003 I was somewhere south of Fort Worth, TX, having visited Dinosaur World, and shortly after leaving we stopped at a cafe that had three computers out which you could use. I looked at them while waiting for the coffee and they just seemed off, strange. It wasn't OS 9 nor X, it wasn't Windows... What was it? As I went over to look it hit me - holy cow, those are running that linux thing I've heard about! Their desktops were beautiful, totally different than the others. I knew then I wanted that.

We on the other hand were shipping software on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000.

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.

> wasn't always taken seriously.

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.

Yeah, but the whole point was about GNU, and not so much UNIX culture, which was been free since the early days, given that AT&T could only charge a symbolic price for the tapes.

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