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Goa has one of India's small-but-active GNU/Linux groups in India, which is already 220+ members strong. If you know anyone back home who would like to get into GNU/Linux, tell them to sign-on at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa URL : http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/0 3_09/b3822601_tc102.htm [37]The Linux Uprising [38]Pecked by Penguins [39]Commentary: Tech Outfits Should Take Notes [40]Online Extra: The Big Guys Latch Onto Linux [41]Online Extra: Red Flags for Red Hat [42]Online Extra: Next from Open Source: Killer Apps? [43]Online Extra: Before Linux Is on Every Desktop... [44]Online Extra: Sun: It's Not "Linux or Nothing" [45]Online Extra: "Programmers Are Like Artists" o Find More Stories Like This Meet Nicholas Walker, digital nomad. Like blues musicians who once wandered the South singing for their supper, this 18-year-old high school dropout lives out of a suitcase--sometimes trading his software programming skills for a place to crash or some spending money. His travels have taken him far and wide, from a programmers' confab in Istanbul to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Walker's fresh, earnest face tells all: He's an idealist. He believes in sharing his software innovations with others. "I'm not comfortable with selling the things I do and making money from them," Walker says during a stopover at his parents' home in New Hampshire. Three hundred miles to the south, on the 12th floor of a Manhattan office tower, Walker has an unlikely soul mate. Jeffrey M. Birnbaum, 37, is managing director for computing at brokerage giant Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Div. He's so buttoned-down that he wears a suit on Casual Friday. You would think this cog in the capitalist machine would have nothing in common with young Walker. But Birnbaum is betting Morgan Stanley's ([46]MWD ) technology future on the kinds of software projects, called "open source," that Walker participates in. Birnbaum has fallen hard for Linux, a penny-pinching open-source alternative to computer operating systems such as Microsoft Corp.'s ([47]MSFT ) Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s ([48]SUNW ) Solaris. He's busy replacing 4,000 high-powered servers running traditional software with much cheaper machines running Linux. Projected five-year savings: up to $100 million. Does it bother him that counterculture kids like Walker have a hand in Linux? Not a bit. "We see their work, and it's good," he says. Just when it seemed the technology world had lost its fizz, a powerful movement is on the rise. A ragtag band of open-source programming volunteers scattered around the globe--and hooked up via the Internet--is revolutionizing the way software is made. At the heart of what they do is Linux, an operating system flexible enough to run everything from an IBM supercomputer to a Motorola ([49]MOT ) cell phone. Because it's open source, Linux can be downloaded off the Web for free--though it's typically bought by corporations as part of a package that includes service. The computer realm may never be the same. Imagine the havoc in the energy business if some newcomer started giving away gasoline. Linux is bringing on a convulsion of that magnitude in tech. Practically every tech company is being forced to figure out how to take advantage of Linux--or to avoid being swept aside by it. And don't be fooled by Linux' harmless-looking penguin mascot, Tux: This stuff is shaking up the balance of power in the computer industry. It poses the biggest threat to Microsoft's hegemony since the Netscape browser in 1995.... [Read full story at the URL above] _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.goanet.org/mailman/listinfo/goanet
