Red Hat is the worldwide leader in market share for the second year running according to IDC.

VA Linux Systems surpassed analyst expectations today, reporting revenue of $50.7 million and a loss of 10 cents a share, a nickel better than analysts predicted.

Caldera Systems, one of a handful of publicly traded Linux companies, beat estimates today with a narrower-than-expected loss.

IBM and Red Hat have made a worldwide software agreement to collaborate at both

the engineering and marketing levels to integrate and bundle a number of IBM's ebiz products.

KDE was honored as show favorite in the desktop category at the LinuxWorld Expo.

Sun announced that it is making the Solaris Operating Environment Network Driver Porting Kit for Linux Drivers available free of charge. This kit provides scripts and guidelines to let developers convert PCI-based Linux driver source into a binary Solaris driver for the Intel platform.

MSC.Software announced that it is to provide scientists, engineers and technical designers with a pre-integrated and optimized turnkey Linux Cluster solutions based on its MSC.Linux appliances and HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations.

Red Hat announced the IA-64 JumpStart Program, which provides all the software,

tools, support and training needed for independent software and hardware vendors to quickly develop solutions for Red Hat Linux on Intel's new Itanium IA-64 architecture.

HP and IBM both pledged last week to support Linux applications on additional variants of Unix, so that Linux binaries could become an almost universal format for deploying applications.

IBM is embracing Linux with a vengeance and, in the process, tossing a challenge to Microsoft. As the prospect of a Microsoft breakup looms closer, competition

is heating up the already bubbling Linux market.