CompuServe and AOL both predated the GNU Project (!), while Prodigy was nearly contemporaneous with it, and I could imagine these becoming or evolving into centralized social media services and huge-scale communications intermediaries -- maybe with or without the web -- if they hadn&#x27;t encountered the competition that they did. And they were able to make a lot of progress, in their way, without the GNU toolchain.<p>On the other hand, the ease with which startups could enter this world from the 1990s onward owes a huge amount to GNU and to languages and tools that owe a huge amount to GNU.