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Don't anybody kid themselves. IBM would gladly have dominated this market if Microsoft hadn't come along. The shock is that Microsoft won out.

Absolutely. Netscape used the same sort of "give it away for free" along with "embrace and extend" sort of strategy that Microsoft later used for IE when Netscape took over the browser market. I don't want any of them to have that kind of control. Not Microsoft. Not IBM. Not Apple. Not Netscape. Not Novell. Not Sun. Not even GNU or Linus Torvalds. I want options. No, not to the point of subsidizing options that aren't viable but to the point where they don't get squashed by product dumping, licensing games, and lawyers.

I don't want any of them to have that kind of control. Not Microsoft. Not IBM. Not Apple. Not Netscape. Not Novell. Not Sun. Not even GNU or Linus Torvalds. I want options. No, not to the point of subsidizing options that aren't viable but to the point where they don't get squashed by product dumping, licensing games, and lawyers.

I can appreciate that. But don't forget that what you may perceive as an additional "option" may, in fact, be anticompetitive. Here's an example. SCO claims that IBM took code from SysV and added it to Linux in violation of agreement. Who gained from that? You did. So did IBM: It used the code to help sell its Linux services business. But it was also anticompetitive, and may have had the result of driving a commercial Unix vendor out of the market. Consequently, I question whether having "options" is a meaningful standard for competition.