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Time was that Microsoft and its Unix competitors could depend on FUD, much of it grounded in reality, to steer customers away from Linux. It might have been a cheap alternative to Windows at the low end, but Linux didn't scale well. There wasn't enough third-party developer and middleware support. There weren't enough Linux technical support experts to go around. The OS wasn't secure enough.

And when it came right down to it, Linux wasn't mainstream enough for your average risk-averse CIO.

Despite those continued shortcomings, Linux is now mainstream, as key players in the financial, retail, government, consumer goods, entertainment and other industries sign up. Reuters, for instance, is moving its Sun Solaris-based Market Data System--hardly a low-end platform--to Hewlett-Packard Linux-on-Intel servers to deliver more than twice the throughput at half the cost to its brokerage and bank clients. Consumer products giant Unilever, aiming to cut costs by 40 percent while boosting performance and simplifying its IT architecture, plans to replace its various flavors of Unix with Lintel servers at its operations in 80 countries. Pixar, citing better price/performance, is replacing Sun Unix servers with eight Lintel blade servers to support its specialized film-production techniques.

This column has already documented Linux's inroads into government IT organizations--a trend Microsoft cited in its most recent SEC filing. The German government, enticed by steep IBM discounts on Linux systems, is standardizing on the OS and other open-source products at the federal and local levels. Agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and other countries are committing to Linux as well.

Linux Marches On

While Microsoft and Unix rivals such as Sun continue to improve the price/performance, security and scalability of their proprietary systems, the global phalanx of Linux developers isn't sitting still: The 2.6 version of the Linux kernel, due out later this year, promises significant scalability and memory improvements--developments that sold Unilever and other enterprises.

Linux will continue to gain ground not so much because it's cheap and it's open and it's more scalable than ever, but because the big systems vendors are squarely behind it. IBM, HP, Dell and, to a lesser extent, even Sun have made Linux a cornerstone of their strategies. Unlike the "thin computing" alternatives to Windows that the systems vendors halfheartedly peddled in the mid-1990s, Linux can be slotted into most enterprises without wholesale architectural changes, so the vendors have an easier row to hoe.

In the end, Linux will thrive because it gives customers more flexibility. With proprietary Unix on RISC, customers are locking into a system vendor. With Windows, they're locking into strict licensing contracts. As one Wall Street IT exec said during a panel discussion at the recent LinuxWorld: "In an open-source world, better technology has a better chance to succeed." Customers aren't asking for much more than that.