Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

> This could potentially break Linux in the same way that it "broke" Unix.

Unfortunately for those Microsoft guys, this is not going to happen.  Vendors successfully
broken Unix because Unix is "traditionally" licensed (even though a few rather untraditional
license conflicts did occur).  Each can have a different version, each have no way knowing how
other vendors achieve the effect they were touting, each implemented their version
incompatibly, and there is no way to have the "fork" rejoin except when a vendor acquires the
assets of another, which didn't happen very often really.

Linux is protected against this scenario by its license.  Vendors can do whatever they want to
fork their own version of Linux, extend whatever, etc.  But apart from very early adopters,
most interested developers will tell them that it is unacceptable to use their solution until
all solutions of all forks have the same interface.  At that point vendors are forced to join
their interface.  And also, GPL gives a very easy way for this to be done, since everybody
know what everybody else is doing.  Somebody is going to pick the greatest features in each of
them, perhaps reimplement them, and put them in mainline.  Then the distinguished advantage of
the vendors disappears, and they will find new things to compete on.

In other words, while Unix competitions tends to hurt everybody, Linux competition tends to
benefit everybody.  As is written by RMS in 1992, that "Competition becomes combat when the
competitors begin trying to impede each other instead of advancing themselves", and GPL
stopped that.