Not so much "the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea" and "bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior", but...

Not so much "the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea" and "bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior", but... closer to... "changing a fundamental building block needs to solve a user problem" (and there are multiple kinds of users involved). :-)