[ Thanks to Ian
Johnson for this link. ]
“When IBM unveiled its backing for the open source Apache Web
server in June 1998, and Oracle announced a month later a version
of its flagship database for the GNU/Linux operating system, free
software gained not only yet more visibility but also
respectability. Since then, GNU/Linux has continued to make inroads
into the corporate server market, to the point where it is now the
only serious rival to Microsoft’s Windows.“In some respects, it has already moved beyond Microsoft’s
flagship product. GNU/Linux is the operating system at the heart of
low-cost supercomputers called Beowulf clusters, widely used in the
scientific world. Combined with the open source Globus toolkit,
GNU/Linux dominates the hot new area of grid computing–linking
computers with very fast connections to create a large virtual
machine. And IBM has announced that it will be using GNU/Linux as
the operating system for the world’s most powerful computer, Blue
Gene/L…”