For years, SuSE has considered its YAST (Yet Another

Setup Tool) technology--software for installing,

configuring and managing Linux--an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the General Public License (GPL), sources familiar with the plan said.

Despite the furor surrounding the SCO Group's lawsuits over Linux, companies have not been deterred from adopting open-source technology.

Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea's largest automaker, and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp. have adopted a Linux cluster system built by International Business Machines Corp., the world's largest computer maker, for vehicle crash simulation testing and analysis, IBM Korea said on Wednesday.

A year after it launched its Centrino chip package for building notebooks with wireless networking abilities, Intel has begun a public project to let Linux take advantage of the hardware.

Linux was the fastest growing operating system in the point-of-sale (POS) terminal market in 2003, according to a study by IHL Consulting Group. However, Linux's market share is still quite small, and adoption has slowed since Microsoft released Windows XP Embedded (XPe) IHL says.

Just as the legal battle over Linux was about to become even more expensive, Microsoft suggested that a hedge fund invest in the outfit.

Macromedia will begin experimenting with Linux support, releasing versions of its development tools that work with the open-source operating system, a company executive said on Thursday.

In the open-source community, the rumor that just won't die claims that Microsoft is funding The SCO Group's legal actions against Linux. On Thursday, those allegations rose again with reports of a memo that links Microsoft with a financial backer of SCO.

EV1Servers.Net this week told its users that it had

their interests in mind when it signed an

intellectual-property license with The SCO Group Inc. to use Red Hat Linux. However, that hasn't stopped some of those users from threatening to leave the Web-hosting company over the deal.

Not so long ago, Linux was only for the technically adept. Then large enterprises claimed it as their own — only they possessed internal resources aplenty to confront its complexity. These days, however, more and more small- and mid-sized businesses are moving to the fastest-growing Operating System (OS) for good, solid reasons — and they aren't looking back.