>>13
More or less true about piracy, except for the large population of newbies who buy from OEMs and pay for Windows without realising they're doing it. Then again, as hardware prices plummet and Windows accounts for more and more of the sale price of the PC, the OEMs are starting to turn around and threaten MS with Linux. At the moment they're mainly doing it to get MS to give them a better deal, but as Linux adoption accelerates it's likely more of them are going to start being serious.
Which is exactly why MS needs to switch to a service model and lock both users and developers in tighter before they lose their loyal following of pirates and OEMs.
Re Sun, it's difficult to know how far to trust them. They've got some brilliant hackers but at times they seem to be acting like a mini-microsoft. You wouldn't suspect them of planning to leverage corporate dependence on their API but you can never be sure, which is the precise reason that many open sauce hackers won't touch Java (that and also they're fully aware that there are far better languages). Eric Raymond expounded on this in his open letter to Sun.