On Monday, I spent the day checking out the exhibits at VMworld in San Fransisco USA.  While the key focus was on VMware and many of the companies present focused their product support on the MS platform, it was encouraging to see a strong representation by enterprise level companies such as Canonical, Redhat and Novell.  While it is common knowledge that probaly 75% of the servers around the world run on a Unix platform, there are still Microsoft holdouts.

As well, there were vendors who focus on open source platforms.  One vendor in particular was Likewise,who provides solutions for a variety of Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac interoperability challenges. a key focus is to integrate non-Windows systems into Active Directory.

While the OSS community remains split on whether there should be a 'business' model built around the open platform, there have been great strides made with the recognition of viable alternatives in the enterprise space.

Check out the 'Bossies', Best of Open Source Software awards.  http://bit.ly/mLL2p and you will see some great examples of where open source is headed.