Free as in "free beer", but not open source until much, much later.

Interestingly enough the JVM hotspot compiler was done by Smalltalkers (checkout Strongtalk)

Java was free. (And marketed by a large organization.)

It's true, and a huge point. Until Squeak came along I as a hobbyist -- who was really interested in Smaltalk -- simply couldn't get my hands on a Smalltalk (other than GNU Smalltalk which doesn't count). All through the 80s and early 90s I salivated at screenshots and descriptions of it, but never got to play with it.

That said, When I did finally get Squeak, I found it pretty neat, but it just never blew me away like I thought it would. I just didn't have anything to do with it.