Just as a reminder to keep us on topic, my point here is that the relationship between Bash and Red Hat Linux is very similar to the one between IE and Windows. Not because Bash and IE serve similar purposes, but because in both cases, simply removing the program from the product would greatly damage that product. And that's not because the program is integrated into the product in some "incestuous", unnecessary, or illogical way. It's simply because the product contains many other programs that require the one being removed.

I don't think that it's fair to equate bash with IE - the one is a shell, which has been a OS component since the year dot, and the other, is a web browser.

Well, it was.

No-one's "extended" bash to the point where things like Apache won't run without it. Hence my comment about running without a controlling tty.

Yet I can't install IIS4 on NT4 without installing IE? Wassup with that?

And yes, it would require testing and maybe some tweaks to replace bash with the shell of your choice. The point is that it can be done.

You cannot replace IE in the same way, because core OS functionality now depends on it.

My file browsers don't depend on Mozilla - sure, Nautilus can use Moz to display HTML content, but it critically doesn't stop working if Moz isn't present. I believe that there are moves afoot to enable Nautilus to use the gtkhtml widget to display HTML content. (Sans scripting and net connectivity, natch :-))

Explorer is now basically an IE window with files in it.

This need not be the case. I present Windows 95 as evidence.