The penguin’s come of age. What began as a battle between proprietary and open source Linux software, started by geeks around the world, isn’t plain tech rhetoric anymore. It’s now a mainstream commercial platform — a technology that enterprises are taking very seriously and looking at as a major cost-effective solution that has scalability and a great future roadmap.

A free software that can be downloaded from the Web, Linux has a source code that’s open and therefore available for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute freely. Proprietary Unix and Windows operating systems aren’t available for such tweaking.

With the movement getting the support of IT biggies such as IBM, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, which have devoted many of their engineers to work with the open source movement, enterprises are now showing confidence in adopting Linux. It’s no more now about getting your software free — in India the dominating Linux brands are Red Hat and Suse from Novell.

But companies are ready to pay.

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