"IBM and the other corporate powers are happy finally to have an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Don't underestimate the weight that the good, old ABM (anything but Microsoft) mentality plays in vendor and customer decisions."

IBM President Samuel Palmisano's keynote address at LinuxWorld Expo last week may have contained no surprises, but that's good news for Linux advocates as the company extends its commitment to Open Source systems. Within the keynote itself, the press conference that followed, and a cluster of product-specific announcements, the implied message from IBM management is, "We made the right decision in backing Linux.

"You can tell these are exciting times for Ed Gauthier, and his enthusiasm is unmistakable. He's Program Manager for IBM's zSeries and S/390 Marketing and Enterprise Server division, which just won the Best Hardware award for the Linux World Expo 2001. If you can see the picture, this ain't the kind of machine you're going to find in your neighbor's basement."

If you can get the Linux operating system for free, how are companies making money on it? At LinuxWorld, companies plan to profit from free software.

"The first release contains the all new and wonderful ntfsfix utility, which repairs some of the damage that the current Linux NTFS driver does when writing to an NTFS partition. If you are doing any writing to NTFS partitions using the Linux NTFS driver this is an absolute *MUST* at the present time."

"Red Hat and IBM previously announced a deal with Daiei Information Systems in Japan. The companies will deploy 15,200 Linux servers running the Japanese version of Red Hat Linux in 7500 Lawson grocery stores in Japan primarily for supply chain management."

Contract-manufacturing giant Flextronics is laying plans to tap into open-source hardware for its ASICs. And both Metaflow Technologies Inc. and IROC Technologies SA are building products using the Leon-1, a Sparc-like open-source processor developed at the European Space Agency's Technology Center.

Contract-manufacturing giant Flextronics is laying plans to tap into open-source hardware for its ASICs. And both Metaflow Technologies Inc. and IROC Technologies SA are building products using the Leon-1, a Sparc-like open-source processor developed at the European Space Agency's Technology Center.

Companies selling Linux and related support services may be struggling in the eyes of investors, but within the information technology industry the open-source operating system is rapidly taking a firm hold.

While Microsoft executives publicly vacillate between declaring Linux either the most hyped operating system or the biggest threat to Windows, in reality, the company has learned some powerful lessons from its open-source competitors.