Serious challenges to the Redmond Borg's monoppoly power are coming from places like Peru, Brazil, China, India,... 3rd world countries seem to be less afraid of picking a fight with Microsoft. Admittedly, that is because they have less to lose, but also they just can't afford to pay M$'s licensing fees, plus open source is a national security issue. You don't want some multinational in Seattle having back doors to log on to your government servers, do you?

Well, apparently France thinks differently.

The EU parliament is the only force keeping corporate influence moderately at bay. If it weren't for them we'd have software patents, riduculous intellectual property laws, no REACH, and the Balkenstein directive.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman