Microsoft was a surprise winner in the open source awards announced at LinuxWorld last week.

The company's Services for Unix 3.0 won the award for best system integration software in the Open Source Product Excellence Awards.

Easy to miss among the 10 product category awards announced on the last day of the show, Services for Unix 3.0 supports Red Hat Linux 7.0 as well as the Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and Hewlett Packard HP-UX Unix flavours.

But it is still a Windows-based product, with the user needing to run Windows NT4, 2000 or XP Professional. The Unix/Linux element is needed in order to access the Unix operating systems.

A purist might therefore argue that it is not open source at all.

Other awards include:
Best of show: SGI Altix 3000 supercomputer
Best network/server application: SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server
Best developer tools: IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer v5
Best data storage solution: IBM Tivoli storage manager
Best security solution: Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus
Best open source project: Ximian Mono

Open source software is increasingly finding a place in the business world.

Get the latest news, views and technology updates in a weekly round up of the Penguin's unstoppable march by signing up to vnunet.com's FREE Linux newsletter here.