Yeah, it's weird. "How would people behave if everything was different?" I don't see how there's either $5 VPS or Heroku free tier in a world without free Linu

Yeah, it's weird. "How would people behave if everything was different?" I don't see how there's either $5 VPS or Heroku free tier in a world without free Linux on commodity hardware, and I'd argue that without those, software would have taken a much smaller bite out of the world than it has over the past 15-20 years. One thing I know is that all the companies I've worked for in my 10-year career would not have been possible to start the way they did without open source software. First of all, they all had a period of at least a year where they were just an idea and built up an MVP for no cash. If license costs had been significant, who knows how that would played out. Second of all, throughout my career a significant portion of my coworkers have been self-taught. Actually, everyone has, to some degree, even the people with actual CS degrees have run stuff for fun. And for everyone, that's depended on license-free software, no money to install and free to mess with. If this had come with a price tag or other limitations, maybe we'd've done something else on our Tuesday nights instead.