In the final installment of this three-part series, industry experts from across all major engineering applications give us their opinions on the OS battle pitting NT against Unix and Linux against both of them.

"I wonder whether Linux as we know it today is really suited for widespread desktop use. Sure, I think Linux is great, and the X Window System does much to make

Linux more attractive, especially when running with a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE. But in its current state, Linux is just too much."

Big companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard have a very simple business motivation for backing open-source software: lower total cost of ownership for their hardware platforms.

"Is Linux starting to converge on a desktop standard, and if so, is that

necessarily a good thing? I've been pondering these issues for quite some

time, and some recent market survey information that's come to my attention

has shed at least a few stray photons in their general direction."

Why are some organizations slow to embrace OSS? Although the criticisms

contain kernels of truth, they are often overstated and should not present

an absolute barrier to tackling an enterprise project.

dsniff 2.3 has been released. Why is this important, you ask? dsniff 2.3

allows you to exploit several fundamental flaws in two extremely popular

encryption protocols, SSL and SSH.

The days of $100,000 proprietary telecom switches is long over. So are voice-only networks. The future belongs to voice over Internet (VoIP) systems. And the glue that's going to hold them together "almost has to be open source- based."

Linux is an ideal candidate to make this scenario not only possible but cheap, too. For under $200, one can setup an inexpensive box that runs Linux and allows only web access. The maintainence cost of such a machine will be low, especially if booting off the CD-ROM drive is used and reliable remote administrations tools are deployed.

IBM announced it would spend $1 billion on the open source system in 2001 and a Linux clustered computer win with Shell. While the news shows continued momentum for the alternative operating system, its path toward commercial acceptance remains lengthy.

Might it be that one could cobble together a system such that the kernel takes care of all the hardware-based graphical duties, such that one could boot Linux with frame-buffer support enabled and switch directly into a window manager and desktop, bypassing XFree86 entirely?