Competition authorities in Germany and the United States today highlighted the fundamental role that Free Software plays for competition in the software market.

The Palm Pre line of smartphones and the new TouchPad tablet computer, are very good products, but they have not been doing well in the market place. Apple, with iPhone and the iPad, has a near choke-hold on that market segment.

Lately, a lot of talk has been coming out of Europe. The talk I am referring to concerns an anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling a web browser they make with an operating system they make. The claim is that Microsoft has made competition in the web browser market difficult because Internet Explorer is included with Microsoft's Windows (a computer operating system).

If you look at the enterprise server operating system market, there's Microsoft's Windows server platform, there's the UNIX platform and there's Linux. What's needed is good strong competition between the platforms, resulting in robust systems with the features that enterprises want.

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks.

Microsoft has long been worried about Linux competition in the server market. When it came to ordinary PCs and laptops, however, it knew it had little to fear.

It's something of a tradition that we pit the latest version of Windows against our trusty old operating system. This isn't because we want to raise the profile of Windows, or ignite further flamewars on which is better or worse. It's about understanding the market and understanding the competition.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that Novell and Red Hat could soon face new competition in the Linux server market. Something new from Microsoft? Nope. Another attack from Oracle? Not quite. This time, the competition could come from tiny Canonical and the company’s latest Ubuntu Linux release.