That's funny. I view Open Source as a way of establishing standards so that interoperability between systems actually happens. Those established standards (which I view BIND, innd, sendmail, POP, and LDAP as) keep companies like Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, and HP from creating the mess we had back in the 80's and early 90's (aka the complete pig's breakfast) of separate e-mail standards, name lookup standards, protocol standards, and even database standards.
Right now we have the browser issues between MS and Netscape, however we wouldn't have gotten that far if the browsing technology both are based on didn't have a reference implementation that was open source (Amaya and Lynx come to mind), as well as the underlying protocol as open source, and the name resolution technologies as open source, and even the same e-mail standards in the same fashion.
You and I both know Microsoft would scrap NNTP, POP3, and sendmail support in a second in Exchange server if they had the chance to. Sun would do the same thing with their iPlanet products. From what I remember, IBM had to add POP3 and SMTP into Notes because of customer demand.
However, it seems that it IS a way of locking out the end user when taken to an extreme by about 5% of the people who like the ideals behind it. The one person with the balls to even go to Microsoft and talk about Open Source and its ideals gets stabbed in the back by a bunch of Slashdot (read: Drooling Blind Linux Advocacy) users.
It's gotten to the point where most of the people I know who use Linux (who represent quite a cross-section of the tech community from this area) won't even go on many of the Linux/Open Source sites because these idiots rant and rave all day about political philosophy, and stabbing anyone in the back who wants to show non-techies why Open Source is good (hint: Having universal standards like Sendmail and POP3 makes a developer's life easier) for establishing a core protocol set of universal standards that can be easily followed and duplicated. Do you think I honestly want to deal with having Notes, PROFS, Exchange, and POP3 clients to just read my mail ever again? I've had accounts on all four of those systems just for work, and it was a hassle connecting to all of them except the one with 10,000 Open Source implementations.
ESR BTW wrote an awesomely practical and easy to use piece of code. Fetchmail is da bomb. I am a big fan. It's better than what passes for Open Source these days, which usually is another graphical mp3 playing front end that never compiles quite right. Either that or something to catalog and file pr0n.
TCP-IP.NET. Hahahaha. In a way that's already true. What's the metric of people using Microsoft to connect to the net and browse these days? It's about 75% I am guessing? (I know I am one now, using IE 5.5 with Windows 2000 Pro here). If there wasn't an Open Source implementation of TCP/IP that quickly got accepted as the open standard that it is today, we'd be using Micnet (the protocol from Xenix), NetBEUI, or something even worse from the bowels of Redmond (shudder). Even MS gets Open Source. Of course they check the license to make sure it's BSD and then incorporate it wholesale into Windows 2000 (specifically the TCP/IP stack, FTP client, and Telnet client)
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However, I am one for advocating why Open Source is a good thing. Explaining how it can be used to effectively communicate standards to developers, and using the e-mail debacles of the 80's and 90's as an example, people catch on quick. Unfortunately, too many people confuse Open Source with GPL, which it is not (and there is much good GPL code). There will always be free and non-free software, and Stallman even says so himself. Some of his idolizers just need to get off the crack pipe and stop being blind advocates for pushing away those who actually want to prevent the alphabet soup of standards for everything from ever happening again.
Mitch