This is very energetic thread: this comment opens things up in a new way.
Just to make a new point in the conversation, there may be an America/Europe divide opening up here. Don’s comments seem to me unarguable: if there is a choice between a commercial monopoly on the one hand, and a free alternative on the other, there will be no room for the market, and that is a bad thing. But it is not the fault of Mitch Kapor. The market vanished once the monopoly was established. The remedies Don suggests might have restored the market, but the American government, which alone could have enforced them, shied away.
So what can we do about that? Within America, the only people who can do anything are the rich and idealistic, like Mitch Kapor or Andy Herzfeld. I wish them well. But companies and governments outside America have to pay the MS tax too. And there is nothing in European culture to stop, eg the EU from subsidising open source development. Doing so seems to me a prime example of enlightened and far-sighted self-interest. An office suite, pim software, and a browser are by now pretty much as necessary for a modern economy as a road system or functioning telephones. Why shouldn’t they be developed in our universities (thus teaching generations of students practical software engineering) and then delivered free to the wider world, thus doing something to repay the taxpayer costs of student education?
Comments by Andrew Brown [alloneword at dial.pipex.com]