<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> >Better Google dominating the market, rather than Microsoft. >Though I believe it will be a long time before Microsoft is >dethroned. Google at least is contributing resources and >code to the open source world. </blockquote></div> I wouldn't be so optimistic - a corporation never does anything out of goodwill. They will help offline Free Software just so that more people can have good access to their online services, but that doesn't make them a friend of Free Software - all their online services are proprietary and closed source. If anything this could be the doomsday scenario for Free Software - a push to web services where Free Software has effectively no presence (due to running costs of servers, etc.), Google will then expand their online services to cover more and more of what is traditionally done off-line until everyone uses Google's proprietary services and have no Freedom to modify or redistribute the software. This will be a much harder fight for people will think being able to access their documents elsewhere, and run the same services on all operating systems is a benefit and Google has a lot of momentum (and money) in the web services sector. Unless we see a real push for Free online services like <a href="http://libre.fm">libre.fm</a> - Free Software may become obsolete. (Sorry if I quoted it wrong, I'm still new to mailing lists)