Its common knowledge that things change when you factor in time and a different generation, a different way of thought and all of that.

What has alternative come to mean to you? What does it represent?

An alternative to great 80sRockbands like Winger, Dokken, Ratt, Def Leppard, White Lion etc.

That's pretty much the definition I had in mind. It was a label used primarily in the 80's that meant anything outside of mainstream Rock. And at that time most of it was better than mainstream Rock.

alternative pop and rock do indeed root in the eighties, more or less coming forward from post punk bands... there's an interesting book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad, which pictures the evolution from those still post punk bands like Mission of Burma, Fugazi,... 'til it totally came to the mainstream with Nirvana's Nevermind...
alternative music has up till now embodied most of the music that I like and yes I do dislike hairmetal bands of the eighties and of any other decade...
alternative music is often downbeat and somewhat or very much depressive, a thing I appreciate, but which gets often slagged off, certainly during the last couple of years, not in the least by scruffy Darkness fans...

When I thought about, it occured to me that so much new music is 'alternative.' Seriously, Godsmack and Tool are alt. metal; emo is alternative; Greenday is alt.; Blink-182 is alt. Plus, all the obvious 90's and 80's alt. bands are still alternative. It keeps going and going! Everything has become the alternative from what alternative was in the early 90's, an escape from: thrash, new wave, and glam. Not that those three have died or that they haven't been infused with alternative, but that changes little.

I always thought of alternative music as something that could not be classified by normally accepted genre labels. Uz Jsme Doma, Mr Bungle, Laurie Anderson all come to mind. I do use terms like "Alt Rock" and "Alt Metal" as reference points, but if I call something "Alternative", it is most certainly not going to be Jane's Addiction or Green Day.

The term was basically abused in the late 80's/early 90's. I do remember a guy I used to work with around that time telling me "I ONLY listen to alternative music". What he meant, of course, was that he liked the Cure an awful lot.