Reaching into small spaces, Oct 03, 2006

You may not know what Linux is, but there's a good chance you use it every day.

Linux software company Red Hat has established operations in Brazil and Argentina by acquiring its Latin American distributor, LatinSource Technology, for an undisclosed sum.

Shares of the Raleigh company have surged 15 percent this month to the highest level in a year. They rose 7 cents Wednesday to close at $16.31.

I think you will probably be happy with Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail program as well. Savvy geeks I know who are using Thunderbird like it and highly recommend it.

A quote from Mohandas Gandhi graces the lobby of Red Hat's headquarters in Raleigh.

"First they ignore you," it reads. "Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

It's fighting time now, says Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chief executive. For years, the software company struggled for acceptance, selling a computer operating system that can be downloaded for free from the Internet.

Tuesday morning, Red Hat planned to sell $400 million in bonds. By day's end, it had orders for $500 million.

Investor demand for the 20-year notes was stronger than anticipated, allowing the Raleigh company to raise more money to pay for acquisitions or international expansion. That was fueled in part by growing interest in the Linux computer operating system and Red Hat's rising fortunes.

Sales at the world's largest distributor of the Linux computer operating system, an alternative to Microsoft's Windows, increased to $33.1 million in the third quarter, up 36 percent from the same period in 2002.

It's fascinating to watch open-source projects making their way into the Microsoft world. The freely available OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) offers competition to Microsoft Office, though its Windows version is nowhere near as stable as the Linux one. Mozilla 1.4 is a state-of-the-art browser in both Linux and Windows, one that will soon break into two separate products, a browser called Firebird and an e-mail program called Thunderbird.

Red Hat corporate officials told investors Thursday morning that the Raleigh software company had only begun to "scratch the surface" in the Linux market and that there was a vast amount of untapped business, especially in China, India and other overseas markets

Maria C. Winslow, 37, started her Raleigh business, Open Source Migrations (the Web site is www.windows-linux.com) last year when she saw that open-source software -- Linux and related software applications -- had matured to the point that it could offer a viable, money-saving option to cash-strapped organizations and businesses. Winslow, a programmer by training, works with a team of contractors who act as consultants to customers interested in making the switch to open source -- which is cheap, even free -- software. Connect's Christina Dyrness talked to Winslow, who lives in Chapel Hill with her husband and 3-year-old daughter, Zoe, about the challenges of her businesses and the changing perceptions of open-source software. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.