Over the last month, the big IT industry players have yet again been jostling for position in the Linux market, overshadowing any moves from the Linux Big Four - Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera and TurboLinux.

The end of October saw the release of Trolltech's Qt/Embedded Linux development tool under the GPL. This will allow developers of embedded Linux devices use Qt/Embedded without the restriction of being unable to modify the source code. A well known developer of Embedded Linux systems is Lineo which stands to benefit from this decision.

Red Hat promoted its vice president of operations, Kevin Thompson, to the position of Chief Financial Officer. The announcement comes on the same day that Red Hat will hold its first-ever analyst's day where the company is expected to outline its business strategy to achieve 80% revenue growth and profitability by its mid-2001 target.

JBuilder Foundation is a comprehensive set of visual development tools for creating Pure Java, platform-independent business applications, applets, servlets, and JavaBeans for the Java 2 platform. It is available as a free download.

Linux may be temporarily down, but it's far from out. That was the defiant message from Sam Ockman, CEO of Linux server company Penguin Computing, speaking at NetWorld+Interop 2000.

The Linux movement is expected to reach another milestone next month when Linus Torvalds officially sanctions the long-awaited Linux 2.4 kernel for commercial release.

Eazel proposes to radically change the way people buy and maintain software. Instead of going to stores to purchase software, a user can buy the software online. The program is then downloaded from the Internet and automatically installed. Alternatively, users can pay monthly subscription fees for access to the software they want, including all upgrades and patches.

What the company is trying to do -- make the open source Linux operating system an industry standard rather than a hacker's fantasy operating system -- fuels a kind of romantic aura that hard data doesn't stand a chance of defusing. Not to mention the whole knocking-Microsoft-off-its-perch thing.

IBM has just launched another major initiative that can be expected to increase Linux adoption in the enterprise. Bargain pricing on enterprise applications that its Small Business Server offers will give ISVs and VARs more incentive to support Linux in the small business market, while this IBM/Sendmail combination will do the same for Linux in larger businesses.

IBM is expected to debut a component of its e-commerce WebSphere server that runs on Linux, continuing its effort to bring the operating system to more of its larger server systems.