It was described in detail much earlier than that, in ESR's The Magic Cauldron, part of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: "...When the development of the open-sour

It was described in detail much earlier than that, in ESR's The Magic Cauldron, part of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: "...When the development of the open-source X window system was funded by DEC in the 1980s, their explicit goal was to 'reset the competition'. At the time there were several competing alternative graphics environments for Unix in play, notably including Sun Microsystems's NeWS system. DEC strategists believed (probably correctly) that if Sun were able to establish a proprietary graphics standard it would get a lock on the booming Unix-workstation market. By funding X and lending it engineers, and by allying with many smaller vendors to establish X as a de-facto standard, DEC was able to neutralize advantages held by Sun and other competitors with more in-house expertise in graphics. This moved the focus of competition in the workstation market towards hardware, where DEC was historically strong. ..." from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s11.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cau...