Deborah Magid, who works in the software division of IBM and liases with venture capitalists, said: "I’ve watched our use of open source grow and I agree it’s totally unstoppable. A lot of people wonder why we feel that way about open source, but in 1995 we shed our proprietary mindset. We supported Java because it was a portable platform, and Linux was attractive to us for the same reason". And, she said, the use of Linux is growing.

The move in industry and governments is enormous, with China, with Russia, with the UK government, with companies like Morgan Stanley. About a dozen countries are now looking at Linux on the desktop, she said.

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