> (...) His reply: "Linux? Nah, that's an hobby project, the customer uses professional software". Two years later the PM had been sacked and the customer was s

> (...) His reply: "Linux? Nah, that's an hobby project, the customer uses professional software". Two years later the PM had been sacked and the customer was starting to migrate everything to Linux. (...) I recall using Linux around 2000. Calling it "hobby project" might be derogatory, but it was definitely very rough on the edges. For perspective, the infamous SCO lawsuits, which to me marks the moment Linux was officially deemed a competitor and a threat by established companies in the industry, only took off nearly a decade after this date. Back in 2000 I wouldn't have risked my career by suggesting my company's product line should depend on it to run. Also, a lot changes in two years, specially in IT circles. I also recall back in the early 2000s people rushed to install new development versions of distro releases because those would finally add critical feature/fix an egregious bug even at the expense of introducing regressions. Knoppix was only released late 2000, which goes to show how untested this domain was back then.