Strawberry has that feedback. Both xdg and Alias are that rare bird that straddles the Win32/*nix fence. Alias, in particular, has helped drive a lot of the Perl-on-Win32 stuff.

As for the discussion of these behaviors ... Yes, it is a default behavior. And, with a bit of fiddling, you can get the Win32-default behavior to occur in *nix. The parent process has to be the one to do that kind of decision - the child can only offer up options. And, yes, I have occasionally wanted that kind of behavior and been annoyed at the stuff I had to do to get it to dwim.

But, discussing default behaviors does have a good side to it and that is to help understand why different defaults were chosen so that when we are in the position of determining default behaviors, we make better choices. For example, a few jobs back we were putting up a completely new app with a lot of complex behaviors available. We spent weeks working through the various defaults we could set and trying to figure out which was the "best" default behavior (for some value of "best"). Defaults are probably one of the hardest things to get right. Apple spends an inordinate amount of time on it and is praised for elegance. Linux spends almost no time on it and has a reputation for being overwhelming; Ubuntu has spent more time on it and is a very easy-to-use distro. Win32 ... I have mixed feelings. :-)