It was considerably less common for companies to make use of FOSS, understand it and be willing to invest in it. Even the idea that it was possible to get paid

It was considerably less common for companies to make use of FOSS, understand it and be willing to invest in it. Even the idea that it was possible to get paid for developing software that is given away to everyone for free was rather unorthodox. To me it seems to be quite the opposite, from 1994 to 2004 or so it was very normal for people to drop 30-70 Euro on a Linux distribution (which were available in local book stores). I bought a lot of Slackware, Red Hat, SUSE, and FreeBSD boxes. Some of these distributors hired prominent members of various communities (X.org, kernel, KDE, etc.) to sponsor relevant projects. After ~2004 this changed very rapidly. Probably because of: the availability of broadband Internet, Canonical giving away Ubuntu CDs for free, and the beginnings of the 'everything should be free'-culture boostrapped by Google Mail and other services.