"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."

"Steve Ballmer recently revealed the not-so-surprising notion that Linux was his company's number-one threat. For any other company, this would be a sure sign that it was finally taking the Linux threat seriously. But for Microsoft, you can only tell they're worried when the trash-talking starts. And Microsoft is trash-talking Linux big time."

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.

Whenever a new kernel comes out, there's a lag time between when it's adopted by those who don't mind compiling it themselves and by those who are waiting to get it bundled in an already-tested package from the maintainers of their distributions. The delay could be shortened by reducing the work that the distributions have to do to adopt the new kernel.

"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."

"There was Kylix, sure, but the Linux industry still suffers from blindness to the fact that the desktop is crucial to the growth of the operating system, and this requires solid, full-featured, easy-to-use desktop applications. IBM might be porting Linux apps to AIX -- but where's SmartSuite for Linux."

"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."

"The war between Windows and Linux is not about quality. At the very least, it is not about quality alone. It truly is about freedom from tyranny at both the desktop and the server levels. Microsoft has the audacity to pursue its despicable antipiracy tactics only because Microsoft owns the desktop."

With its open-source foundation, Linux is wide open to people everywhere for viewing, modifying, and copying. What can be gained by adding Linux to your OS lineup? What are the risks? Should your organization begin gearing up for this new world, and if so, how?

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.