Zuki Inc (ZUKI)

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LESS THAN 2M OS MERGER - Darl McBride doesn't seem like a bomb-throwing, high tech counterrevolutionary. He speaks imprecisely and haltingly about issues like constitutional law and the GNU General Public License, which governs the distribution of Linux. But McBride is certain that he's right, even if many legal analysts say the factual reed on which SCO bases its claim is thin. He believes he's on the just side of a historic struggle that has significance beyond today's headlines.

"It seems to me that the battle isn't really SCO versus IBM, or SCO versus Linux," McBride says. "I think there's a war going on. The war is around the future of the operating system, and whether it's going to be free or not."

On that score, at least, McBride is right. Over the past decade, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds and his global band of coders have created an open operating system just as capable as closed proprietary systems like Microsoft's Windows or Sun Microsystems' Solaris. Companies from IBM to Red Hat sell services based on Linux, often at substantially less than what it costs businesses to buy and operate Windows. Corporate America has noticed. Linux now runs on 19 percent of servers, according to research firm IDC, and on a small but growing chunk of the desktop market. Meanwhile, millions of consumer electronics devices – from cell phones to DVRs – rely on Linux, too.