License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
That's the point. It wouldn't exist. It's not possible without research and OSS. You can't write off the entire foundation of CS before a date. Well you can, but it's ignoring history.
> "Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist."
The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines.
FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS license and other software tools.
Not sure who “us” is meant to be, but the first Internet boom (1995-2000) used a whole lot of Solaris, Windows, and Cisco. Of course there was plenty of OSS too, but Linux servers, or Intel servers, weren’t the standard.
I remember visiting early Hotmail and their sharded “capital unit” was a great big Sun storage server and a bunch of Intel desktop towers running BSD. The latter was considered rather wild at the time.
Last I checked, some eBay URLs still had “ebayISAPI.dll” in them, which is a remnant of that period.
