Popularity does not determine monopoly status. If there was any merit to the tying of an O/S to hardware, than the government would of acted long before now. Regardless of popularity the government would have to act if a company practiced anti-competitive behavior.
In the mainframe market, which is the only thing that matters here, there are competitors to IBM and those are Oracle (via Sun) and Hewlett-Packard. Therefore no monopoly can exist and any claims of anti-trust are invalid.
Florian,
It's not an anti-trust situation because the situation you describe is exactly the same as Apple's whole business model which has been upheld with legal precedent. You say IBM doesn't want to make z/OS available for use on non-IBM hardware - that is the same argument Pystar tried with Apple not wanting to make OS X available for use on non-Apple hardware. The courts expediently slapped Pystar down and confirmed that business model is perfectly OK.
The emulator is an entirely different issue. Anyone is free to clean room backwards engineer an emulator for the purposes of interoperability - that is allowed under the fair use doctrine. However, they cannot use any copyrighted or patented technology that IBM created in order to do so. IBM is under no obligation to assist them in creating or maintaining their emulator. IBM is perfectly in the right to demand legal review of the emulator if they feel that it violates any of their IP. As this can only be done in a court of law through legal discovery, it is not unreasonable to expect that the group behind the emulator would receive the typical legal paperwork (demands) that initiate the process.
Any company is free to compete in the mainframe market by offering their own hardware and software solution. If they can't convince customers to switch to their platform from IBM's that is just capitalism at work.
Then you'd be a fool who doesn't think profit is a motivation for a salesman lying about the usefulness of their product by blasting another's product to make theirs look good.
"...commercial DMS Clarity Suite..." indicates they have a commercial product they are advertising for, though I haven't been able to dig up any info on it or their clients that use it.
cfwtracker.exe is a 100 KB application that uses 102.4 MB of memory. Someone's program that uses over 100 times its program size in memory consumption probably shouldn't be blasting anyone about memory bloat.
Currently my Windows 7 system with 4 GB of memory only consumes 1.75 GB of memory with 6 different applications open and lots of multi-tasking going on.
Perhaps most of the people on XPnet are running netbooks with 2 GB of RAM? Then perhaps the guy could have a point. However, most Windows 7 ready computers are spec'd with 4 GB of memory, so clearly Microsoft envisions most people will have at least that much memory in their Windows 7 system and this 100% use of memory rant is just hype and damn lies.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn