[scombridae]

In the same frustrating sense that one broken down car on the highway can ruin everyone's commute, one vendor giving away free product can ruin a market. You can blame Stallman, Torvalds, the Java consortium, etc., who realized the only way to compete against Microsoft was price, or more precisely the lack of it.

As painful as Microsoft's dominance was, the era of shrinked-wrapped cdroms represented a more honest time when what you got was commensurate to what you paid. Now the only game in town is dangling the carrot and selling your customers' info to advertisers.