Open source was very obvious in 1998 for competent tech companies. As in look at successful companies in 2005 and most of them where using OS software in 1998.

One of PG’s essays has a line like, ‘any competitor using Oracle was easy to ignore.’ Successful OS software needs to be good enough not to need marketing and happens to be free. It might not be the best, but cheap and good enough generally has a lot going for it.