It's been a fast, bittersweet trip for Andover.Net and its shareholders. The company, an information site in the hot Linux market, today announced it accepted a buyout offer from computer maker VA Linux--a move that comes just two months after Andover.Net launched an IPO.

Question: How can a stock trading at more than three times its asking price just two months after going public be a dog? Answer: When it belongs to VA Linux Systems.

There's a strand of anarchy in IT.  Although it's now a giant industry, there have always been people whose work was motivated more by intellectual challenge than financial rewards.  The open source movement is part of that strand, and Linux is its finest flowering. 

Compaq says demand for Linux among its largest business customers is exploding, but it's not finding a matching need for services.

A senior IBM official on Wednesday offered a glimpse of the company's long-term Linux strategy as the company announced it will extend factory installation of the upstart operating system to include its thin clients, servers, and notebooks.

Linux used to be the alternative: the funky, weird free operating system that grew up on the fringes of the commercial software world, something that hackers and programmers played with in their spare time. No longer: Linux is now big business — huge business, in fact, now that publicly held Linux companies like Red Hat and VA Linux measure their market caps in the billions. Will Linux lose its soul?

Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip is still months way, but the Trillian open-source consortium will have its native Itanium Linux ready to roll the second it comes off the fabricator line.

Hoping to create a one-stop Linux powerhouse, VA Linux Systems, which sells computers and support services, today announced it has acquired Andover.Net, a site dedicated to Linux information, in a cash and stock deal worth roughly $1.04 billion.

Linus Torvalds kicked off the third LinuxWorld Expo with his keynote address this morning at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. Like the venue itself, Linus's keynote was a little different than usual.

A longtime trendsetter in the Open Source movement, Linux continues to bare all to friends and foes alike. Every day thousands of hobbyists and developers fiddle with every part of the operating system, finding new ways to improve on it. Some of this results in small fixes to make parts of the system more effecient. Others streamline the code while adding new features that allow more flexibility, while some fix bugs left by predecessors in a day where security was barely an issue.