Hmmm... back in the day there were IBM PL/I, Microsoft BASIC, Borland's Turbo Pascal, ...
Post 1990 or so the FSF came out with gcc, gcl, etc. Since then there are free languages like Python and PHP. However, many open source projects are "corporate dominated" for better or worse. LLVM would not be the quality framework it is if Apple hadn't invested in it. Linux got SMP scalability thanks to IBM. No Google, No V8, No node.js. A language like Nim might have no corporate sponsor now but if it catches on it may very well get one.
We have more options for languages and editors than ever before that directly compete against commercial options. And a decent amount of the time, they're fundamentally better and widely used commercially.
I certainly do remember the main options being: buy commercial software, download an inferior freeware, or go through a huge effort setting up emacs to be a low quality version of one of the first 2.
Oh, and now it's ok/expected you don't have to use windows for everything, because that was the case for a while.
IMO, it's never been easier to use excellent software while avoiding corporate bullshit, so I'm glad we're not back then anymore.
Edit: FWIW I'm early 30's programming for about 15-20 years of those (arguably!)
When I was a kid, there were no free compilers. You had to pay for tools like Turbo Pascal. You were either lucky if you found a decent free C compiler to download off a BBS or you pirated one.
When the original 128KB Macintosh came out, I started programming on it in assembler because I couldn't afford any of the compilers. Being able to work at that level affected the trajectory for about the first half of my career, and I think for the better. Growing up in a world with free compilers (and complete-enough scripting languages too) seems very different.
If you're building for a proprietary OS, then yes the tools sometimes aren't free - e.g. iOS development. However we can 100% use free tools to build free software running on a free OS, with the simplest example being C code compiled by GCC running on Linux.
On top of my head: CPAN and Debian's since both are distributed with mirrors not controlled by the the main project. It is possible that some mirrors save statistics but there is no aggregation of it. But, yes, most package manager servers track download statistics and as long as they throw away the IP addresses I do not see any harm.
Which also serves a useful purpose for devs, it's an easy way to avoid typosquatting by making sure you're not looking at a package with a similar name to the one you want but with only 2,000 views instead of 2,000,000
When your compiler/editor didn't call back to some corporation every time you compiled code?
When our package managers weren't linked to data aggregators watching our every move?
When we used free tools to build free software.