Wintel doesn't get the credit they deserve. Everybody running Linux on anything faster than an 80386 owes Bill and Andy lunch, at least.
And indeed, looking forward: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ARM-Atom-Netbooks,7242.html
Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.
However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.
Software might not have eaten up all the performance profits, either, though. Overall, we might have had more clock cycles free and gotten things done more quickly with whatever hardware we had.
It's a false dichotomy. There is no need to imprison (as Stallman would say) the user and disrespect his rights (at least to use, understand, improve) in order to be commercial. What "Gates et al" have done is to bind their users through the software they use to manage their lives and jobs, ensuring long-term prosperity through technological dependency.
The folks at Red Hat, Canonical and MindTouch (just to name a few I have in my head right now) are every bit as serious as Microsoft when it comes to be commercial and to be paid for their work.
The main difference being they show much more consideration towards their users and customers.
I also believe that the "Stallman or nothing" suggested by so many of his fans is a false dichotomy. You don't need to be rabidly communistic about software to oppose the "imprisoning" influence of corporate software vendors, after all.
But this attitude, of sacrificing "just a little" here and there for more convenience is not healthy either.
And then there is another false idea: Free Software is not about Communism. Communism is about the collective ownership of scarce resources. Free Software is the realization that software (as ideas and knowledge) are infinitely abundant.
The truth of the matter is that we're probably going to continue to see an increase in corporations using the GPL and (more to the point) other mutually incompatible copyleft licenses, because copyleft licenses can be extremely valuable for those who want to maintain control of the codebase while still getting the benefits of open source software, thus providing a way to sucker competitors into supporting your software "product" while still keeping an anticompetitive advantage by way of the MySQL AB business model and other ways to combine the GPL with proprietary licensing for market domination profit.
So, in summary . . . yes, it's true that "free software" in general isn't necessarily communistic or socialistic, but copyleft licensing in particular does bear a striking resemblance to various principles of communism and socialism. Just like communism and socialism, it also tends to get co-opted by market dominating monopolists and their ilk.
Also, your selection of companies seems a bit deceptive. These companies' profit strategies are very narrowly focused on the one market where it's possible to make money with free software — and even that isn't really making money from the software. You have to be in a market where people will pay through the nose for support contracts, because the software itself isn't making much money.
The one real exception I can think of is Mozilla, which makes decent money off of Firefox. Otherwise, unfortunately, it does generally seem to be necessary to bind the users enough to make them pay you for the software. (That's not a sarcastic "unfortunately" — I do think it would be great if I could reasonably sell free software as profitably as non-free software, but I don't see any evidence that it's feasible.)
Wouldn't that be a question of time and business model? Apple is a hardware company and both were around when the PC (not the IBM one) was invented.
> isn't really making money from the software
It's very hard to directly make money from software sales if you grant your customers the right to share it. Software companies make money out of the scarcity of software ("You want Windows? Ask Microsoft"). Free software is naturally abundant. It's possible, but not easy, to make your users pay directly for it.
And Mozilla can't ask users to pay for it. Not only because it's infinitely abundant (anyone can give you one) but Microsoft's IE comes bundled in the OS most Firefox users run. Opera does that and look at their market share.
That's what I was getting at: It's hard to be rewarded for free software, so there really is a dichotomy between free and commercial software. It's not just Jobs and friends being dicks and restricting customers.
I wonder if more startups should remember this.
No. You are only making software that doesn't usually get sold. Most of it isn't, but you can custom-develop - building upon piles of other free software - and then license it under a free license to your client who chooses whether to share it (always under a free license) or not. Free software can be sold. I know this because I did it a lot.
> It's hard to be rewarded for free software
OTOH, it's much cheaper and easier to develop it. With closed software, you have to invent your own wheels. With free and open-source software, you are free to use the ramjet engines other people have developed.
There are a few small areas where FOSS is as commercially viable as anything else, and you'll notice those are also generally the areas where it seems to be most mature. You can't generalize those tiny areas and say that making open-source software in general is a reliable income source.
Making open-source is not a direct income driver and, apart from very limited niches, will never be, but, nevertheless, it allows a business to have full control of its technology stack.
Company A builds a great game using a closed-source library built by company B and company C builds another great game using, say, an LGPL library. When the underlying platform changes, breaking both libraries, company C is not subject to whatever the strategy of company B is and, therefore, can be first to market with a new, compatible, version.
This is a hypothetical situation, of course, but illustrates one important thing about free software - most people don't really make it: they use it and, from time to time, and, if and when the need arises, add a little improvement here or a fix there. Its strength lies in the sheer number of people that give a little hand, scratching one another's itch.