Hmmm... Interesting points. I'm far from being an expert on networking protocols, but I get the impression that (users of) other OSes don't perceive networking functionality as a 'stack', so to speak - TCP/IP is so tightly integrated into other systems that I don't think it's recognized as the independent component that we see it as.
The Amiga is interesting in the fact that our core Internet applications were built during an era of zero first-party system development. Things probably would have been different without the loss of Commodore. Envoy (which I have become a HUGE advocate of :-)) was supposedly due to be included with OS3.1. It's not a TCP/IP implementation, but it can be extended to be so, and I suspect that it eventually would have been. Maybe Kickstart 3.4 would have included envoy.library in ROM. Then we'd have had the same integrated networking as other systems. If that was the case, would developers be sufficiently inspired to write their own stacks? Would they be able to bypass the built-in stuff to do so without breaking compatibility?
In other words, do users/developers on other systems recognize TCP/IP as something they can improve upon, or do they just write it off as an OS-level flaw and hope it'll be different in the next version or on a different system?
Hopefully that made sense... ;-)
