This isn't what happened at all. No one went "Mwah-ha-ha-ha let's put it to the small businesses." What happened is free and pretty good beat more expensive. Microsoft has lost a huge amount of server license revenue to open source.

The open source I've written - be it a program or a patch was always open sourced because I wanted to make my program available to others because I thought it might be useful.

@EdwinLarkin: "The only reason corporate embraced open source is that it saw it as a way to drive the small and medium sized businesses out of the market. Why pay for an editor when the good guy Microsoft gives it to you for free? People have been delusional about FOSS for way too long."

Is that you billg ;]

https://www.debian.org/ https://getfedora.org/ https://antixlinux.com/ .. systemD free :]