That is not what I was talking about. I was talking about standards, and for some reason you have equated this with business practices. MS business practices may have been reprehensible - but that is a different issue, and I am not sure why you use that to confuse the issue when talking about Canonical. All I was doing was pointing out that sometimes, standards can hold back innovation. Microsoft could carry out restrictive practices because it was innovative and developed its own standards which helped it achieve market dominance - once it became dominant, it could then restrict competitor access and lock users in. Not the other way around. At the time Microsoft gained dominance, it was necessary to have something like that on the desktop - Apple could have achieved that, except they were actually far more restrictive than Microsoft, because they implemented a ROM-only based OS that would only run on a very specific set of hardware which they controlled manufacture of. Microsoft opened up their software to any who produced a platform to run it. Even IBM could not compete with that. In the inability for these major players to populate the desktop market, Microsoft stepped in maximised an opportunity nobody else exploited. However much I may dislike certain things about them, such as their ripping-off other people's ideas, I cannot take away from them that they changed personal computing in an astounding way, and made it more accessible to ordinary people than it had ever been before.

I do believe that linux should be able to take that process even further - but if it does, it will not be because of the decisions made by committees, or standards they implement.

Mish.