“Like the owner of a new BMW Z3, Kenneth Topp thrills to the
lean and lovely lines of Linux. When he recently encountered
problems with an Ethernet card, he found his solution quickly,
thanks to the hot operating system and a helpful Net community. “I
poked around in the code and got the fix quickly,” says Mr. Topp,
who is the director of engineering for Vujadé, an Internet
services company in Santa Cruz, California. “There was no waiting,
no finger-pointing, no searching for hardware drivers.”
“Multiply Mr. Topp by the 12 million Linux users of the
world who are sick to death of finger-pointing, sitting on hold,
and searching for drivers, and you get, ahem, “market disruption.”
Add in the likes of Dell Computer (Nasdaq: DELL) , IBM (NYSE:
IBM),Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), and SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), according to
research consultancy the Gartner Group (NYSE: IT), the 19 percent
of all corporate IT departments that are evaluating Linux, and you
get “market legitimacy.” Get enough applications, hardware
platforms, and support services in line, and you’ve got, well,
fever.“
“The Nasdaq — at least until recently — had a pretty severe
case of Linux fever. The operating system has been around since the
early 1990s, but temperatures began climbing in earnest when Red
Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) [See Herring 100 profile] held its now-legendary
IPO on August 11. The offering price was just $14, but on the first
day it closed at $52. It hit $123 a month later and $286 three
months after that. And that was just the start: for the last seven
months, the grassroots operating system and hot IPOs of the
companies involved have made headlines in magazines like the one
you’re reading now.”