Companies attempting to profit off the Linux operating system are having the same problems as those looking to make a buck off selling water: How do you make money when your product is ubiquitous and free?

The fact that a number of companies, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, had representatives at both press conferences added to the feeling of déjà vu.

The three trends in creating embedded devices is that the cost of hardware, network bandwidth and software are all going towards zero, but Linux already has a cost of zero.

Linux system vendor VA Linux is boxed in. On one side of the equation you have broke dot-com startups that can't buy VA Linux boxes. On the other side, you have enterprise giants IBM, HP, Compaq and Dell getting serious about Linux systems.

The recent announcement of the KDE League is a good thing. It would be even better if the KDE people hadn't lied about it months ago. Work had been underway on the KDE League, but the earthshaking announcement was to be saved for Comdex, even if it meant deliberately misleading the existing user base in the interim. So much for the open community.

Corporate IT has fully embraced Linux and other open-source products as standard elements in its Internet infrastructure, but most information technology managers haven't deployed Linux inside the data center and say they are unlikely to do so in the coming year.

Linux is fast becoming the operating system of choice for enterprise database users. Linux offers an environment that is flexible, secure, and reliable. As the

use of databases in conjunction with enterprise solutions grows, system and database administrators want to focus on customer solutions--not operating and database systems.

Microsoft denies that the _NSAKEY provides the National Security Agency with a backdoor to Windows files, and reassures customers that the recent crack of its network does not endanger Windows security. But unless Microsoft opens the source code for Windows so we can see for ourselves, we can never really have confidence in Windows security again.

The Open Source business model may make for an interesting college thesis. But, when it comes to making some serious money, Linux companies are a disaster in progress.

If Sun wants the support of the Linux and Open Source communities, they might just want to consider the benefits of the GPL license -- they might also want to take a good close look at how the GPL helped KDE become a more widely accepted technology because of the actions of TrollTech.