Surely, the real reason that Free Software took off in 1998 is that it had hit a critical mass,and re-labelling it as OpenSource probably made very little difference in practice.
The truth is that the GNU effort had been adopted by Unix users and,
more importantly, by academic institutions, at an increasing rate
during the late eighties and nineties, and this produced a critical mass
among "those in the know" by 1997/98 that made it inevitable that
Free Software would be noticed and make inroads.
Eric Raymond may want to have been more important, but really his attitudinising was just a component, albeit valued, in the inevitable flow of events, and not the decisive factor.
The take up owed everything to the CS students during the previous N years who had been taught on Free Software, and respected the model, pushed it, and sold it. ESR was just one of those people who pushed it around. Nobody where I worked had ever heard of him or of OpenSOurce. But they did know about Gnu and Emacs. These constituted the practical elements that made recognition of Free Software
inevitable.
