Through a number of partnerships and spinoffs, Corel is implementing a plan that will refocus its efforts and financial resources on core activities such as its Linux products.

Every major vendor worth its salt is rushing to embrace Linux. Significantly, it will be one of the OSes that the next-generation 64-bit IA-64 architecture would natively support.

Ian Murdock is back, now as CEO of Debian-based Progeny Linux Systems. Last week Progeny announced that it has secured its first round of funding.

SuSE Linux announced a partnership with Lutris Technologies, a leading provider

of open source software and services to further the effectiveness of Linux in the enterprise.

IBM is to announce that it is investing $200m in Linux, in an effort to speed the uptake of the free technology. The money will be used to set up developers' centres across Europe, in which software vendors will be able to create software for Linux.

Although Microsoft Office users aren't likely to switch their desktop software, they believe Sun is making a smart move by opening up the source code, XML file formats and APIs to the development community and that small businesses are more likely than large businesses to adopt it.

Linux's share of the Japanese server OS market grew a staggering 666.3 per cent last year, market research company IDC has reported.

Far more likely is that the two could strike up co-operative distribution arrangements which cut out the channel duplication, which could potentially offer customers a Unix for every occasion.

Although almost a quarter of domains around the world are hosted by a specific type of Microsoft server, Apache servers continue to dominate the server market with over 56 percent global market share.

The number of companies running R/3 on Linux has climbed from 40 in September 1999, to 400 today. Most of these installations are in Linux-friendly Europe.