Some of the appreciation should go to the academic roots, culture and tradition of the early internet. The internet originated at DARPA but many of the earliest

Some of the appreciation should go to the academic roots, culture and tradition of the early internet. The internet originated at DARPA but many of the earliest participants and adopters were academic institutions. FUNET is the Finnish University and Research Network. They provide backbone connectivity and networking facilities to universities in Finland and have done so for decades. They've also run the public FTP archive (actually HTTPS by now) since 1990. It seems to me that at the time, providing a server that distributed freely distributable and open source software was part of an academic culture of sharing and of providing a public good. (The free software movement also has its roots in the academia. Of course "open source" as a term didn't exist back then, but some of the culture did, without the commercial connotations of open source necessarily.) In today's rather commercialized world, I appreciate it that a public institution still runs such an archive in a similar spirit with no direct commercial interest. (FUNET is run by a state-owned enterprise.)