The fear is that, with Linux stocks in the tank right now,

the likelihood of Red Hat (or other distributions) failing

or being swallowed up in a merger is high. My point is

simply that if Red Hat should stumble or fall, there are

others in line who would be willing and able to pick up

the slack. And there are others behind them. The failure

of a single distribution of Linux would not mean the death

of Linux as a whole.

Spending by the U.S. federal government on IT security

is expected to reach almost $1 billion by 2005." The

question to answer: where does Linux come into play?

FOSE is a trade show dedicated to informing government

IT professionals. The Northern Virginia Linux User's

Group brought the first Linux Pavilion to FOSE.

Why do we choose free/open source software? There are

many reasons for that, of course. Do these reasons apply

only for software? Here are a couple of projects coming

out of Japan which stretch the open source model beyond

the software world.

Never let it be said that followers of Open Source news

lack passion. In response to a story on France's legal

challenge to proprietary software (read Microsoft) by

ZDNet, readers chimed in opinions on topics ranging from

socialism to military secrets to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Oh, and Open Source came up, too.

China's Ministry of Education is preparing to announce

significant procurements of software for the Linux

operating system, according to an executive involved with

the plan. There are more people in school in China, than

there are people in the U.S. There are 260 million primary-

and secondary-school students in the mainland.

The key to Microsoft's domination is not in its predatory business

practices, it's in the mindset of users. Everyone else seems to use

Windows. How can anyone hope to run a business in the 21st century,

without the ability to open Microsoft's proprietary file formats?

The new Linux kernel, version 2.4, likely will be released in August or September, said Linus Torvalds, founder and leader of the Linux movement. Torvalds initially had hoped 2.4 would be released in 1999, but in February he amended his prediction to July, 18 months after the current 2.2 kernel was released.

Red Hat chief fights back "I feel badly for PC Week's John Taschek ("Open source is an open road to nowhere"). Not understanding one of the biggest shifts in the industry since the PC in the early '80s is a career-limiting mistake for a journalist who specializes in covering technology."

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has a near evangelistic take on Linux, which normally wouldn't be unusual, considering the growing popularity of the free, operating-system software. However, Mr. Wladawsky-Berger is technology and strategy vice president in IBM's enterprise systems group. He believes the Linux operating system, currently popular for running Web servers, will widely be adopted over the next few years to run other types of servers and a variety of gizmos and appliances.

Makers of the operating system hope to throw off a geeky image says Paul Talacko. Linux, the upstart operating system that many IT experts believe will one day rival Microsoft's Windows, may be the toast of Wall Street but it is still run on only about 3 per cent of desktop computers.