For love, Linus and others put their work up for free. So, RedHat in the past had modified it with RPM and made a living in Linux. Others like Concurrent Computers had also made a living barely, doing RTOS that supports Linux kernels. Both are server oriented. People try Linux desktops and can not keep up with Microsoft features.

Microsoft uses hardware manufacturers to optimize their operating system, and usually took time to update to sp1/2 to make software better. They own 90% of the desktop business.

The server application business had matured but segmented by Unix, Linux and Windows. So, the essential computer business is service, where service on existing architecture has to consolidate non-compatible application software. Service is 60% of the computer sales revenue.

How big is SOA business? Often, contracts for services can reach $billions per year for IT departments of Fortune 100 companies. And Linux can have part of this revenue, if they hire two programmers for two years to service individual customers. Eventually the service job will streamline service software written. into tools and boxed, for combination of software popular for present IT departments.

Novell Netware can get lucky and become a hit with identity management, then centralized synchronized distributed data storage solution and finally e-marketing supply chain based on data mining from accounting software?