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Microsoft is a monopoly in the PC market. There are no true monopolies if you want to get hyper technical. Some joe could have gone out and sold buckets of oil on the street during Standard Oil's height of power, but would that have made him competition? That Microsoft is a monopoly is in and of itself irrelevant. The fact that that monopoly is backed by unbalanced licensing terms and the US patent office, is quite relevant. Microsoft would be no threat to anyone if it couldn't patent its file formats, programming languages and network protocols. Patents are fundamentally at odds with how software is developed. Software development requires interoperability without restrictions. Free and commercial software alike have to be able to work together. That is how networking works. FR wouldn't exist if Larry Wall had taken Microsoft's approach to PERL, the government had not released control of TCP/IP to the public domain and the W3C restricted the ability to create open and commercial implementations of HTTP. If you are using Windows, you are using the BSD networking system to post to FR. Yes, that's right. Windows' networking system was taken from BSD, not written from scratch.