In the FOSS world, it was never a contest. Apache’s features dominated from the start, and nobody bothered to start a competing project. (And why should they? FOSS is fundamentally collaborative, not competitive.)

This is not entirely true, webservers competition within FOSS is also brutal. Apache is the most known webserver out there, but that doesn’t kill alternative webserver projects but on the contrary they multiply. Right now we got a webserver coded on PHP, and another one in asembler, monkeyserver is a micro-web server that is great for tiny system handling tiny footprint.
Geronimo is an application server that specialized on JSP and other languages which is indeed part of the Apache organization but also is fundamentally different than the Apache webserver.
Then again this is based on Microsoft, which is not a good example since Microsoft is just too much of a monopoly to make a case on ‘usual techology’ not all comercial companies will have as much muscle as microsoft and not all of them will act like them.
Microsoft have layers suing everyone and everything that comes around just to stagger on technology innovation. So compare again the application server — Geronimo vs. J2EE as opposed to Mono vs. .NET — this are similar scenarios (FLOSS vs. Commercial) but is very different competition levels.
I think a good example is where commercial is represented by a group of companies and not 1 huge, monopolic company. This essay was about the lifecycle of technology and puting a scenario where monopolistic companies rule the world, is not the most common scenario in american economy at least.

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