Sun was also a huge loser to open source and x86 but instead of fighting it their CEO Jonathan Schwartz embraced it. In retrospect this "Glasnost" approach didn't help Sun survive. I remember the Sun fans used to complain that Linux/x86 was winning in benchmarks but Sun was worth paying N times more (of your employer's money) because it just felt faster and more robust. Parallels to today are left as an exercise for the reader.
As a .NET guy there wasn't much discourse. We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque. Open source wasn't as big. I heard of MySQL and Postgres but thought they were cheap shared hosting thing and university academic thing respectively.
It was definitely like that. One landmark that comes to mind is the Microsoft "Halloween documents" attempting to slow the rise of open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents Microsoft also advertised NT and IIS as being faster than Linux (implicitly admitting that Linux was worth considering) which motivated a lot of back-and-forth "benchmaxing". http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html https://www.kegel.com/nt-linux-benchmarks.html
Sun was also a huge loser to open source and x86 but instead of fighting it their CEO Jonathan Schwartz embraced it. In retrospect this "Glasnost" approach didn't help Sun survive. I remember the Sun fans used to complain that Linux/x86 was winning in benchmarks but Sun was worth paying N times more (of your employer's money) because it just felt faster and more robust. Parallels to today are left as an exercise for the reader.
As a .NET guy there wasn't much discourse. We used SQL Server and collected a pay cheque. Open source wasn't as big. I heard of MySQL and Postgres but thought they were cheap shared hosting thing and university academic thing respectively.