The latest tale of cyber-riches involves the Linux crowd. A recent string of IPOs earned shareholders obscene amounts of money. Red Hat, a distributor of the Linux operating system, is worth about $15 billion. VA Linux, a company that sells computers that use Linux, made history: Its shares leaped 700 percent, making the company worth about $10 billion. Not bad for a firm with 153 employees, $17 million in sales and about $3.3 million in gross profits
Linux is a curious story. It is an "open source" operating system, meaning that no one owns it, and no one in particular developed it. The code was put on the Net and anyone who wanted to work on it, could. At the same time. And did. And added to the final product, which is still evolving.
The open-source model has been touted as "the most powerful movement in the software industry." Today, Linux is estimated to run on about 17 percent of all servers and its popularity continues to grow; last year, it was growing by 40 percent a year.