One of my favorite stories about Open Source is from 1998 (I actually didn't realize how old it is until I stared looking for it yesterday).
In the first half of 1998, the nation of Iceland tried to get Microsoft to produce Icelandic localized versions of Windows 98. Microsoft cited the small size of the Icelandic market and simply said "no".
The story as I remember it, (but cannot verify online, in English) is that the Icelandic Government was trying to purchase computers for the school system, including Microsoft Office (Office 97 most likely), and Microsoft refused (again?) to perform the localization. News reached Germany, where it was picked up by c't; over the weekend, a few KDE hackers had emailed a sysadmin in Iceland and had a first-pass Icelandic translation of KDE by the end of the week. This dead link may hold a clue, but seems to have vanished. Maybe it still exists on microfiche...
It was a pesky little mosquito bite for Microsoft at the time, and a minor success story for open source for a few weeks in 1998 (back when the open source meme was still getting pushback by tech managers). Since then Office XP has been localized into Icelandic, just like Office 2000. WinME (the successor to Win98) doesn't appear to have an Icelandic localization, but Win2K and WinXP (the profitable upgrades to Win9x/WinME) both appear to have Icelandic localizations.
