There is something important hiding in your comment. In a fee market, someone would stand up and provide a modern fork of windows 2000. As this is not happeni

There is something important hiding in your comment. In a fee market, someone would stand up and provide a modern fork of windows 2000. As this is not happening, the OS market is not free. I suppose it's an oligopoly or monopoly at this point. So what went wrong? Complicated question, I see multiple partial answers. * part of governement's job is safeguarding and restoring free markets. Clearly they failed here. * part of it is a natural monopoly. No source code means a lot harder support. * part of it is the copyright monopoly, making a free market basically illegal. There must be some mechanism for protecting creators, but the balance is lost if copyright forbids, e.g. duplication of goods no longer sold * part of it is a failure in standardisation. POSIX is hopelessly incomplete for a modern os, and microsoft ignored it in favor of its own API's (minus some subsystem lip qervice). * part of it is also the 'free' culture (beer, not speach). Someone has to pay for development, and gratis software, os delivered with PC, and piracy make it very hard to make money, especially for a consumer OS. Linux has a perpetual shoe string budget. BEOS had a good try with a better product but ultimately failed. OSX is an interesting case study, but it's not clear what to learn from it. There are probably more answers.