The best place to see the Linux fan following is at the LinuxWorld. People from all over the world were here in the San Jose Convention Center to attend this mega event. Some of us (that includes me too) traveled thousands of miles to get here. The entire town had Linux painted on it, the hotels were full, parking lots were getting filled up faster than before and generally the buzz words were Linux, Linux and Linux.

Mainsoft, the leader in common code-base cross-platform solutions for the enterprise, announced that Microsoft has signed a contract with Mainsoft securing Mainsoft's Professional Services and the right to use MainWin to port Internet Explorer and potentially other technologies to UNIX platforms.

Dell will spend $750m this year on Linux research and development, according to the company's chairman and chief executive Michael Dell during a keynote speech at this week's LinuxWorld Expo in San Jose, California.

TurboLinux, one of the leaders in Linux clustering, and Red Hat, one of the most widely ported Linux distributions made announcements recently that would seem more likely to have come from the other vendor. TurboLinux ported to the 64-bit Alpha processor, and Red Hat announced its first clustering product.

Microsoft is working closely with a company called Mainsoft to port its Windows applications to open source operating system Linux and, possibly, other versions of Unix.

Backed by a growing parade of computer-industry heavyweights, the Linux movement rallied in San Jose for its biggest-ever trade show.

Open-source standards will completely reshape the software industry by 2004, according to a recent report by Forrester Research.

SGI has released the source code for its Open Inventor 3D graphics toolkit. Open Inventor is the de facto standard for rapid development of graphics applications and is used in almost every industry, including CAD, medicine, academia, and movie production.

Lineo announced plans to provide Windows NT and Windows 2000 developers with an

integrated Embedix SDK and VMWARE tool kit that allows developers to work in their familiar Windows environment while creating Linux software for embedded devices.

Trolltech, a developer of C++ cross-platform GUI application frameworks, announced that it is collaborating with Lineo to offer a complete embedded Linux software solution to manufacturers of embedded devices.