I suppose it depends on how you view “stranglehold”. They certainly are listening to their customers who prefer “open” in some contexts. So in some ways they’

I suppose it depends on how you view “stranglehold”. They certainly are listening to their customers who prefer “open” in some contexts. So in some ways they’re better behaved. And most excitement and activity in server side ecosystems tends to be open source. But in terms of economic might, ie. revenue and equity, open source has been a weapon wielded by the tycoons to add to their might. Linux is successful but the dominant vendor is owned by IBM. Canonical some day may also get scooped up. Intel is finally feeling the pressure of custom chips and portable languages (it’s market cap is down to $230b), but Microsoft is nearing 2 trillion in market cap, Apple is 2.3 trillion, and Google/Amazon aren’t far behind either. The result is that we arguably have more open and higher quality infrastructure than ever before. But the ultimate tycoons remain the same - with Google + Amazon being the new entrants.