The free software movement largely solved the problems of software monopolism through the brilliant hack of monopoly laws to provide goods that protect users from would-be monopolists. Though they also recongnized that license profliberation has made technology sharing difficult and are working toward solving that.
Their work has help initialized an extremely competitive sector of the software industry that shows no sign of stopping. For example, new linux distro continued to be funded and distro makers like Canonical continues to improve their desktop experience so that it would one day conquer the desktop market. Firefox was able to gain like 20 percent of the market share despite IE’s inherient advantage of being installed. There seem to be strong competition between KDE and GNOME desktop environments.
They are the finest example of hacking the legal system to provide capitalism unfettered by petty anti-competitive laws.
However, I would like to see the patent system also fall to this sort of legal hack. The situtation is it seem quite extraordinary difficult to get around without some patent trolls chasing your back or inventors whining about the neccesity of patent protection.Thus when you innovate, you have to deal with the costs of patenting your ideas to protect yourself from large patent companies. Even so, there is no gurantee that your protection will spare you the lawsuit along with the possiblity of being barred from the market because of a damn patent monopoly.
If there is any way to get around this ever pervasive patent system and their federal cornies. Let me know. Because someday, I would like to do something about it(medical technologies perhap) with my future hard earned cash gained from my business venture in trying to write pure GPLed games.(Unfortunately, I have yet to master the art of market entrepneurship that seem to excudes from companies like RedHat)