If only they had a open source, full featured version released earlier, probably we would be living in a better software world today. But its early success made people greedy, bent on charging costly licenses, prohibitive to the individual developer. When Squeak was open sourced in 1996, it was already too late, Java and C++ took over, OOP got a bad rep, and we got drowned in incidental complexity.

In 1996, Java and specially C++ were hardly open source, and everyone can easily see how much those compilers and IDEs used to cost.

Sure the JDK was free beer, and there was this wannabe GCC compiler, but that was it.

The JDK was free beer.

What is the point of repeating part of my comment?

To remove the prefix which de-emphasized how really important it was that the JDK was free beer.

"open source" in 1995 was very different to how it is now. There was GNU stuff and the Linux kernel and not a lot else. Now it's a zillion different dev environments and whatnot, but buying commercial tools for software development was far more common then than it is now.