By breaking down the walls between proprietary vendors and forcing them to adhere to a single industry standard known as TCP/IP - the common language spoken by all computers connected to the Internet - Mr. Lynch, 52, has helped pave the way for the commercial Internet.

In addition, unofficial third-party conditional access software modules (CAMs or emulators) are widely circulated on the Internet that emulate the CA systems developed by NDS (VideoGuard), Irdeto, Conax, Nagravision, Viaccess and other proprietary vendors.

A number of executives are coming to see the open systems approach as a way of avoiding the dominance of proprietary vendors like Microsoft.

It's not their fault if it inhibits the ability for proprietary vendors to peddle other solutions.

Given the wide scope of unified communications, there has been a lack of community definition as most solutions are from proprietary vendors.

Code comes from contributions from proprietary vendors, support companies, and open-source programmers at large.

As open source software can always be updated and maintained by the end user, the user is not at the sole mercy of a proprietary vendor.

Excessively proprietary vendors that can't be bothered to use 20 year old standards are the problem.