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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tptacek 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	scooke 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.