I think you're overselling it a little bit. At the time the community wasn't as large and it was much easier to "host your own" OSS site and distribute your software directly. There were plenty of important projects that served themselves in this way and didn't rely on a giant corporation's largess to be "hosted."

Also.. aggregators like freshmeat.net used to exist and did a huge amount of work patching these disparate communities and individual sites together into a single cohesive display of "open source."