> I'm not sure where computing would be today if all software was marketing-driven Basically just look at the 80s and early 90s. Video games, C compilers, NAS

> I'm not sure where computing would be today if all software was marketing-driven Basically just look at the 80s and early 90s. Video games, C compilers, NAS software, operating systems and hardware sales were all almost entirely marketing driven. Before any serious Open Source revolution, you paid for almost any code that was perceived to have value. Functionality built-in was not something people took for granted. Open Source won not because you can't market it (in fact, you can - it's just that nobody is paid to do it), but because it's free. The ultimate victory Linux wielded over it's contemporaries was that you could host a web server without paying out the ass to do it. It turned out to be so competitive that it pretty much decimated the market for commercial OSes with word-of-mouth alone. It's less about their neglect of marketing tactics and more a reflection of the resentment for the paid solutions at the time.