>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹

That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.

>Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News²

Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.

>As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)

Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...