Software

IBM Corp. is continuing its crusade to make Linux the world's most popular operating system. Its GM for Linux is currently on tour in India, and Big Blue is taking its strategy to China, South Korea, Russia, and Brazil, too.

Local government officials in Munich approved Wednesday a plan for rolling out the Linux operating system and other open source applications in more than 14,000 city administration computers.

Linux has won another battle proprietary software with the decision yesterday of Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, to consolidate older Windows and Unix servers on Novell Inc.'s Suse Linux Enterprise Server 8.

Linux has won another battle proprietary software with the decision yesterday of Bergen, Norway's second-largest city, to consolidate older Windows and Unix servers on Novell Inc.'s SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 8.

Upstart Linux vendor Xandros Inc. has made a free version of its Linux desktop distribution available to noncommercial users to encourage its proliferation on computers around the world.

As part of its bid for a foothold in the enterprise applications market, Microsoft Corp. initiated merger discussions late last year with enterprise resource planning leader SAP AG. The talks ended several months ago after Microsoft decided the deal and the post-union integration would be too risky.

It appears as though Sun Microsystems Inc. is ready to join the open source fray. The company has confirmed that it will release the Solaris operating system source code under an open source license.

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