What I find interesting is that these kinds of arguments are being made now for AI….were similar arguments made back in the 90’s during that era of American tech dominance?

Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?

I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.

But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?

And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.

What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countries not super friendly or even hostile to America. The biggest competitor to Microsoft back then was a small nearly bankrupt Apple which was also American. Linux was a tiny little thing.

Many hacker news commentators were around back then. What was it like in this regard?