FOSS vs APPLE vs MICROSOFT

I believe /comp/ never had a truly FOSS VS MICROSOFT VS APPLE
So I'm talking about the corporations/communities here and the main issue is technological advancement.

1. I don't know if this is 100% correct but I see Apple as a gadget/music company. It's not like Apple is helping 64bit integrations. In the past I believe it helped familiarizing other architectures but today it uses the same hardware so....

2. FOSS I believe is neutral. Their power is virtually null and their campaign for openhardware (as in no patents over design) is worst than that for opensource software.

3. So Microsoft remains. Now Microsoft proclaims itself innovative when in reality it has the power over the newer technologies but surely doesn't create them itself. It has been argued a lot of times that Microsoft is hindering technology backwards just like it did with 64bit technology which spread was I believe really slow paced. They claim that it's for our benefit but I think it's more a profit thing for them.

Discuss!

You do know that software such as the Internet, Bittorrent, and file sharing were FOSS led innovations.

What about Sun? Solaris has had a number of very nice OS enhancements like zones, Dtrace and ZFS.

They all have different scope as to what users' opinions are important:
Apple is all about end users; if the end user is happy, Apple is. It's up to developers and admins to step up and provide user friendliness or be damned.
Windows is mostly built for admins. If anything the windows admin has a sweet deal - so much so that ordinary users frequently get admin status just to perform any useful act on the system.
FOSS is mainly about developers. The majority of the FOSS distros seem to be bases and proofs-of-concept, which you can - and by most accounts should - hack into your own liking. Granted, with later systems such as Ubuntu and Mandriva the user friendliness has gone up, but any type of serious administrative work is a major effort for all but the comp-savvy.

That being said, it seems that there is a measure of consesnus happening on the "market" as it were, systems keep "honorably stealing" features from one another and differences in pure functionality are nowadays pretty slim. It mostly comes down to the flavor of the desktop (sic) and access to third party toools that govern the choice of OS.

>>4
I heard that apple had a patent on the moving cursor so microsoft had to reverse engineer a very verbose solution. Is this true?