>"Open" here was a popular term back in the day and bunch of companies used it .. sorta like AI, LLM, and blockchain.

nah. what you are describing is Open in the present day, like OpenAI.

back in the day it meant "open standards, allowing cooperation between secretive competitors". IBM and Digital could both implement to an open standard instead of their traditional proprietary so their devices would interoperate.

This type of openness is what Microsoft liked to "embrace, extend, extinguish", meaning "we'll get kudos joining the interoperating consortium, we'll look cutting edge by adding features which would make us not actually interoperate but are useful so people will adopt them, then we will have killed off this threat to our monopoly"

in that same period of time, open source started to be called that because what was open was the source.