@jeffcliff >both IBM and Cygnus did do a great deal of heavy lifting towards making free software or at least open source socially acceptable.
There's a lot of assumptions unpack here.

Free software was socially acceptable from the very start of computing, as people who were into computing shared software freely without hesitation.

Unfortunately, eventually companies like IBM started to smell profit in the field of software and started making software proprietary and launching psyops that it was "wrong" to share software.

MS-DOS and by extension microsoft windows only exists because IBM wanted a proprietary OS to go with their proprietary IBM PC's (the hardware was slightly less proprietary than usual, so the software needed to be extremely proprietary to "compensate" or something), so they got billy to get them an OS.

As a result, when it came to making it "socially unacceptable" to share software, IBM played one of the biggest parts.

Although IBM has released some free software, I don't believe they've done much at all to undo the damage they've done to the concept of socially sharing software.


CyGNUs was completely different and was a business built on providing support for GNU in response to the then recent success of GNU.

At the start Cygnus only supported free software and developed free software (i.e. eCos), but one day decided to start developing proprietary software.

Cygnus and "open source" don't belong in the same sentence, as they were founded in 1989 and was taken over by red hat (merged) in 1999, while "open source" was only a thing since 1998.

>both were clearly imperfect and engaged in the above, it is likely we'd be way further behind if we didn't have both
Freedom wise, I think things would have been better if it wasn't for IBM, but worse without Cygnus.


GNU did the heavy lifting in developing free software and spreading freedom, while buzzword enthusiasts did the heavy lifting of shilling the "open source" buzzword.