> "...[we] could not imagine that these same corporations would turn the internet into three boring, humdrum walled-off corporate gardens?" One word: AOL (Oka

> "...[we] could not imagine that these same corporations would turn the internet into three boring, humdrum walled-off corporate gardens?" One word: AOL (Okay, technically CompuServe as well. The point is that the public was aware of and perfectly fine with corporate walled gardens even back then.) > "...[we] could not imagine that corporations would just siphon up all that free labor" Say what now? The FOSS crowd were literally begging corporations to adopt Free Software with slogans like "free as in speech and free as in beer" with the aim of killing the "evil Micro$haft monopoly" (sic), the much hated Business Software Alliance, and supplanting proprietary software in general. Every adoption of FOSS or Linux by a business got celebrated on /. as if it were a great triumph. Them later acting surprised that businesses only ever cared about the the "free beer" aspect and were taking them up on their offer because of that and the eventual sharp U-turn from FOSS into open core and other totally-proprietary-but-we're-going-to-pretend-it's-open software licenses has been a source of endless schadenfreude to me ever since. I was there in that era too. Those who could not imagine such things were being utterly blind.