You should take into consideration the many DARPA and public/private university dollars that laid the rails for the FOSS stuff to take off for the internet to evolve. Granted not closed-source, but directed-spending, funded research with lots of people involved, not spare-time hobby projects. FOSS nowadays is invisibly supported by large corporations. My first net experiences were on Genie's pay service, and BBS modem dialup to other people's homes and servers. You were truly free to do as you pleased, not worry about the interpretation of GPL, GPL3, etc... I find the MS hatred compared to the Apple ecosystem here very unfair. I had a 386-based pen tablet, the NCR 3125, in 1994 (it came out in 1991, 19 years before the iPad, 2 years before the Newton). As a closed-source system running either PenOS or Windows 3.1(?), it had serial communication to other laptops via LapLink and a cool handwriting recognition system. The PenOS SDK was free to acquire and play and learn with. I believe Wikipedia incorrectly states the Apple Newton in 1993 was the first PDA to have handwriting recognition, but I guess if that's considering the NCR 3125 was not a PDA. The point is that if you go back past the 5 years windows that is constantly touted in this article, Apple would be the 'evil' one, stealing from Xerox, BSD and others, and then encapsulating it into their walled-in, monolithic kingdom. They were largest market cap company until Google displace them this year (Alphabet), and it is definitely not FOSS, yet the masses go like Soma addicts to the spartan white, cloned stores for more with nary a protest. At least the MS kingdom has so many branches, you can choose to follow any one of them. MS Research is amazing. F#, F*, Typescript, the SMT solvers like Z3, Simon Peyton Jones of Haskell fame, is funded or paid by MS. I think MS is far too diverse of a company to pinpoint one aspect and call it 'evil'. It's the one that is wolf in lamb's clothing, Apple, that is truly to be feared ;)