It's been a good year so far for Linux. Following January's 2.4 Kernel release, predictions were flying around that the open source platform would be squaring up to Sun Microsystems' Solaris by early next year as the corporate Unix flavour of choice.

Mocked by many at the time, these predictions look a lot less daft following the recent LinuxWorld event in New York, which served to confirm just how influential Linux has become.

IBM has already committed its considerable bulk and influence to help push Linux as far as it will go. It was joined in this endeavour at LinuxWorld by Intel, one half of the duopoly that has been controlling computer power on the desktop - and increasingly in the data centre - for over a decade.

During a keynote speech at LinuxWorld, William Swope, vice president of Intel's architecture group, talked up the role of enterprise servers in realising the potential of open source software.

At the same event, Sun released a version of Java for small devices using the Linux operating system. The so-called 'connected device configuration' of Java is designed for set-top boxes, in-car computers and home servers that join computers and consumer electronics devices to the internet.

And while on the subject of influence, it's hardly a major coincidence that during the past six months Microsoft has made copies of the Windows source code - traditionally as closely guarded as Colonel Saunders' secret recipe for his brand of southern fried chicken - available to its larger customers.

There seems barely a technology developer on the planet that does not have at least one eye on the evolution of the runaway success that Linux has become.

Perhaps most significant for the prosperity of Linux over the next 12 months is the hive of current activity among developers and distributors of commercial Linux solutions.

Red Hat takes on the world

Foremost among these is Red Hat. At LinuxWorld, chairman and former chief executive Bob Young, a now familiar figure on the industry event circuit and in the press, talked up Red Hat Network (RHN), the company's most important foray into satisfying commercial enterprise requirements.

While RHN is ostensibly a subscription system for keeping Linux-based systems updated with the latest releases and fixes, it is also, he hinted, a way for companies like IBM to resell Red Hat's products and services, thus magnifying the company's global impact several fold.

Young would not say whether a particular deal with Big Blue, or anyone else, had actually been signed to use RHN in this way, but clearly that cannot be far off. This is exactly the kind of opportunity he envisions for RHN.

Too commercial for its own good?

Those who hope to see Linux as a corporate mainstay, as opposed to an interesting experiment, are eagerly awaiting the first deal between Red Hat, or even another Linux distributor, and someone of the order of Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard or IBM to sell the operating system into their major accounts.

This, in its turn, will transform the job of Linux distribution from one of shifting copies of a free product to one of providing lucrative services on a global basis.

And Red Hat is certainly not alone in the breadth of its ambitions. Caldera, for example, determined not to get left in the slipstream of RHN, has just forged a deal with Acrylis, a Linux services company, to give itself comparable corporate leverage.

Caldera chief executive Ransom Love used LinuxWorld to outline how Acrylis software will work with the company's Volution management and computer monitoring software.

The new service will be available in the second quarter of this year, promises Love.

But Linux still faces the same old problem. Just how commercial can it get before it loses touch with its founding principles?

Some say these principles died on the day that Red Hat snuggled up to Oracle. Microsoft may be seen as the major focus of Linux's progress, but it is important not to forget that Oracle is just as close a guardian of its source code as Microsoft.

So will Red Hat's deal with Oracle have the effect of making Red Hat Linux more proprietary, or of forcing Oracle into joining the open source party?

Critics of the deal fear the laws of gravitational pull favour Oracle's old school model. But with so many other big names appearing to go out of their way to acknowledge the potential of Linux, perhaps the wind has already changed direction.

It could be that, regardless of the future success of Linux itself, its greatest task has already been done - weaning enterprises off depending wholly on their software suppliers, with their tradition of tightly guarded research and development, to deliver the kind of products they want.

Meanwhile, the slightly less commercial version, VA Linux, continues to be an also-ran in the race to make the product a mainstay for business.

Perhaps this is more of an indication that Linux's ability to capture the hearts and minds of the non-techie home user is doomed and that its future will always be in the business market.

Whatever happens in the future, Linux has certainly managed to democratise software. The genie will not now go back in the bottle.