Linux Scales New Heights, Dec 23, 2002

The creeping legitimacy of open source was given a big boost in 2002 when major vendors including IBM, Oracle and Sun Microsystems pledged support. On the surface, it seems like the vendors are just thumbing their nose at Microsoft. But something big is at stake here. By offering customized services for open-source software, vendors stand to lock in customers on service—a much more lucrative market than software licenses.

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz handed down a preliminary injunction at the request of Sun Microsystems that will force Microsoft to carry Java. He said Microsoft had "leveraged its PC monopoly to create market conditions in which it is unfairly advantaged.

Linux hasn't quite reached mainstream status in business computing, but it's coming close. And it has become a major competitor to Microsoft.

The reason? Linux's underlying source code — the guts of the system — is available for free. Developers can download it, tinker with it and customize it for a company's needs. And in a year when words like "monopoly" and "copyright" dominated much of the technology industry, "free" drew a lot of attention.

At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last August, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the crowd that Oracle is "moving very aggressively" to run its own operations on Linux.

The reason for the move is simple, according to Ellison: Linux is "cheaper, faster... and more reliable than any other environment around."

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