Sorry guys, but there's one thing left out here that MS could use as a
"weapon" and which Linux has no defense against (well, not much of one).
What if Microsoft simply did not distribute drivers for those hardware
products (e.g. network cards, scsi controllers, isdn cards, video cards,
etc.) which did not require NDA's and such in the interest of "Quality
Control".
Sure, it's lame, but isn't, "Windows 98 won't work without IE?"
If all of a sudden all the major (read "cheap" because of mass
production) hardware vendors had a choice of selling to free software
users or positioning themselves to sell to Windows98 users, what do you
think they'd do?
Simply the inconvenience of having to insert a disk, manually locate
and install some driver or the other, or some similar inconvenience
could cost a hardware manufacturer many thousands or millions of dollars
in the Windows market.
Compared to that, Linux is still just a bump on the chart.
And the DOJ probably would be able to stop them until that "bump" has
been smoothed out.
Don
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