Motivation is indeed hard to

Motivation is indeed hard to keep at times, I've suffered from motivation's flood and ebb quite a few times; it can be disheartening.

I suppose I would align myself, in the Free Software world, as being 'anti-proprietary', ending restrictive licenses for the masses rather than 'pro-Linux' or 'anti-Microsoft'. Indeed I agree that Microsoft is a monopoly and as with all private monopolies it crushes the world with its leverage in the desktop computing market. Yet I see many monopolies and personally find it hard to just target Microsoft, despite being the monopoly of monopolies, and not target e.g. Apple too.

Revolution sadly doesn't happen overnight as it were. Looking at Communism, there was a gap of some 69 years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the first real communist revolution in Russia in 1917. The Free Software movement has been going for some 24 years so far, with much stronger growth in the last 10; I hope and believe that in the end Free Software will prevail, sadly though it may take years more to come.

Also if one measures just the growth of Free Software, looking at how some companies now ship their computers with GNU/Linux, how countries plan to use GNU/Linux in their schools (Russia and Macedonia come to mind in the past few days) and the OLPC. As you say Microsoft is not not stagnating, nor dying, but neither is Free Software, which seems to grow slightly stronger every year.