It's time we corrected a common misperception: There's no law against selling free software. Read GNU's General Public License. In fact, Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman has supported himself and the foundation for years selling free software.

A number of companies have tried some novel approaches. Troll and others such as Borland have developed a model that furthers some of the goals of free software advocates without producing software that's 100 percent free itself.

Some Linux applications can get by with merely the presence of a specific version of glibc, the C library that contains the primary system calls used by Linux applications, but others depend on the presence of certain system utilities, installation applications, or other features. Linux community's answer to this is the Linux Standard Base.

Allchin said, "open source is an intellectual property destroyer. I can't imagine something that could be worse...for the software business." We disagree. If anything, it has the potential to bring the software industry back to the marketplace.

"While some have jumped to the conclusion that Schacker is cynically spreading FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt") about a technology (Linux) and development model (open source) that poses a threat to his company, I prefer to think that he is genuinely concerned about the welfare of users of Linux in embedded applications. I will do my best to allay his fears."

"If Linux companies refocused their efforts away from maintaining multiple base distributions, they could concentrate on the kind of added value that would crack the Linux market open."

Henderickson reports that ILM has been moving toward Linux. Linux looks like it has a big future for us because it's UNIX without the expensive boxes. ILM's future desktops, he expects, would be based largely on Linux, with some Mac OSX machines.

"Despite how bright things were just 6 months ago with dozens of companies joining the fray, the market for Linux games seem to have stagnated and even briefly collapsed. So I took a long hard look at who and what is driving Linux gaming, why it hasn't worked so far, and what can be done to remedy the situation."

Many IT shops are facing a challenge of managing Linux. The economic benefits of Linux can be undermined if the technology ends up exhibiting a disproportionately high total cost of ownership. This can happen if systems administrators have to spend time managing Linux servers separately from other enterprise resources or have to use different tool kits to do so.

Microsoft's political strategy is to confound the concept of Open Source with the concept of intellectual property infringement in the minds of policymakers. It is using distorted definitions of Open Source to do political and hence market damage to Open Source.