My understanding of the early Internet is that there was fierce competition among commercial, closed-source server and database software, and that the dominance of Linux, Apache, MySQL (and now PostgreSQL) etc were far from obvious or guaranteed. I think we’re in a similar moment with LLMs, and I’d love to read some stories, or see some examples of discourse on mailing lists, forums, or whatever on this subject from that earlier period. I think it would be helpful for grounding present-day discussions. What can you share from this era?

Back then your typical management, who frequently followed "you can't go wrong with picking IBM" in their decision making, would question open source software and take actions to stop it from being used (like blocking sites in a corp firewall). Open source software was a counter culture then, now its common and mainstream.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.

It was definitely like that. One landmark that comes to mind is the Microsoft "Halloween documents" attempting to slow the rise of open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents Microsoft also advertised NT and IIS as being faster than Linux (implicitly admitting that Linux was worth considering) which motivated a lot of back-and-forth "benchmaxing". http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html https://www.kegel.com/nt-linux-benchmarks.html

Sun was also a huge loser to open source and x86 but instead of fighting it their CEO Jonathan Schwartz embraced it. In retrospect this "Glasnost" approach didn't help Sun survive. I remember the Sun fans used to complain that Linux/x86 was winning in benchmarks but Sun was worth paying N times more (of your employer's money) because it just felt faster and more robust. Parallels to today are left as an exercise for the reader.

As a .NET guy there wasn't much discourse. We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque. Open source wasn't as big. I heard of MySQL and Postgres but thought they were cheap shared hosting thing and university academic thing respectively.