Worthy to note, it seems like there were some incredibly dedicated hardworking engineers that drove extremely hard for a really long time to make this happen.

They did manage to get large buy in from the company after quite a significant journey. But it seems so much like a kind of outside event, something begat & pushed for not because it was a smart top down move, but because a couple super driven engineers made it their cause.

I see this often. We didn't document our efforts well at creating the OSS ecosystem that youngsters take for granted today. They attribute the efforts of some thousands of advocates that made all this happen to "market forces" or some other nonsense. OSS exists because some really dedicated hackers and their allies spent years of mostly unrewarded effort making it happen.