I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged, and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero budget and didn't know any alternatives.

The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise just how good some of the free software is.