Am Donnerstag den, 21. Februar 2002, um 15:53, schrieb Greg A. Woods:
>
> In other words Apple's doing what almost everybody _but_ M$ have done
> all along in this industry!   M$ has effectively had to resort to
> nefrious business practices in order to convince the otherwise
> independent hardware makers to lock buyers into using M$'s software.


Since this seems somewhat philosophical...

Apple has followed the path of self-produced hardware. A path followed by
may large companies, such as Sun (does anyone really run solaris-i386...)
IBM (other than the PC... which IBM only shortly held control of...), 
HP (
say the pa-risc, etc...).

Apple has, and read this as Steve Jobs, has refrained, or canceled,
alternative hardware sources. M$ on the other hand has locked hardware
maufacturers into making their products either only run MS 'easily', or
when a user changes OS's making it incredibly difficult to go back. (For
example, on the Compaq system, one has a recover disk. However if one
repartitions and removes the 'D:' drive and factory installed data, that
'recover' disk is worthless).

At the present moment I don't see that as changing. The anti-trust 
'settlement'
as stated in the papers suggests that rather than a 'fine', M$ will use 
the opportunity
to spread itself further... sort of like a drunk driver ordered to pick 
up trash along
the highway as a community service, but parks his van with a large 
liquor ad
on it for all to see.

In the world of NetBSD I'd fear WindBag Systems gobble up the more 
productive BSD
producers than believe that use of M$ will decline giving room for a BSD 
alternative.