I think it started even earlier than that, with the launch of Mac OS X. At that time, all dev software on Windows was expensive or pirated, and while Linux had the free tools, the desktop experience wasn't the best. So here was OS X, with all the OSS compilers and such, and you could still run Photoshop and Word.
Now, Windows has free dev tools, and Linux has a much nicer desktop.
Widespread vote manipulation of electronic systems much, much easier to keep a secret.