The change in spirit of the web and even open source itself is well encapsulated in a comparison between the 1998 version and the 2026 version of opensource.org. One dressed up and attending galas, and one handing out zines.

Perhaps one of the primary reasons for its success over the free software movement is in the marketing. From the Case for Open Source: Hacker's Version:

Mainstream corporate CEOs and CTOs will never buy 'free software', manifestos and clenched fists and all. But if we take the very same tradition, the same people, and the same free-software licenses and change the label to 'open source' - that, they'll buy.

One of the chief objections to using open source and free software during this time was around reliability. The case is made by Eric S. Raymond on the '98 page with a very period-appropriate angle:

Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that's too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources make the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might very well kill your business.

The several other case pages are fun to flip through since, of course, as it turns out, Eric was right.