> Even back then free was tough to compete with...
At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there.
While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.
At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there.
While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.