Don't look now, but e-business is growing webbed feet. E-commerce, e-procurement networks, B2B partnerships, e-marketplaces--they're all ripe for exploitation by Linux, the upstart OS sporting the penguin logo.

Linux is already a force in Web serving, Internet security and e-mail, both in the private sector and governments around the world. Linux is the leading choice for Web deployment, powering 30 percent of all public Web sites, according to a study conducted last May by Netcraft, Inc.. The Feds, impressed by Linux's low cost and rugged efficiency, have installed Linux networks at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Census Bureau. TurboLinux Inc., a San Francisco-based Linux distributor, recently sealed a deal to supply the Chinese Ministry of Information with thousands of Linux units as it embarks on a nationwide ISP rollout.

Linux was in the spotlight at Comdex last month, its rich capabilities showcased in the booths of industry leaders such as Red Hat, Inc., VA Linux Systems, and Caldera Systems, as well as dozens of lesser-known vendors of server clustering, firewalls, databases, and other Linux-based solutions.

Now the freely distributed OS has its sights set on e-business applications--a lucrative, exploding market dominated by Unix and Microsoft. By the next presidential election (won by Al Gore, who had spent the previous four years as an Internet consultant) I expect Linux to have rained on Solaris's parade and shattered Windows' e-hegemony.

Consider these facts:

At Comdex PartnerAxis of Orem, Utah unveiled a Linux e-marketplace, a venue for trading in Linux products and services, and a portal for Linux information and support. The PartnerAxis Linux Marketplace, built with Exterprise Inc.'s Linux-based ActiveMarket software, is scheduled to go live in February.

The same month IBM rolled out WebSphere Commerce Suite 4.1, its high-end e-commerce platform, for Linux. WebSphere, which integrates Enterprise Java Beans and CORBA to build high-volume e-business apps (see E-biz platforms open up), joins Big Blue's Small Business Suite on the Linux platform.

A Japanese company has agreed to buy more than 15,000 IBM eServers running Red Hat Linux to expedite sales and deliveries at its convenience stores.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., relies on more that 4,000 Apache Web servers running Linux to drive its wildly successful search engine technology, incorporated into the Net initiatives of companies like Palm Inc., Cisco Systems, Hungry Minds.com, and the Washington Post.

Why is Linux catching on as an e-business platform? For the same reasons it's been seized upon by companies large and small as the answer to their prayers in Web site development, collocation, server clustering, and office productivity. As software gets more and more complicated, and businesses have to get to market faster than ever before to compete, Linux simplifies things while giving the IT department lots of options.

The OS is stable, greatly reducing the possibility of system crashes and server downtime. It's inherently scalable, suitable for CPU-intensive database applications as well as straightforward Web serving. It's flexible, allowing developers to obtain the optimum blend of hardware and software components to serve up an ad banner, or safeguard customer data. And, thanks to the GNU General Public License that governs its distribution, it's very inexpensive. In a study done a year ago by Gartner Datapro, Linux ranked higher than Windows NT and all commercial Unix OSs in customer satisfaction.

That's an amazing accomplishment for an OS that hardly anyone outside a small fraternity of Unix devotees had heard of as recently as 1995. Linux's beginnings were modest indeed; Finnish college student Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel that resembles his name as a personal science project, on a lowly Intel 386 PC (he couldn't afford a Unix workstation). Torvalds never dreamed in 1991 that his bootstrapped OS would ever challenge the supremacy of Sun Microsystems or Microsoft.

But perhaps Linux's viral growth--and it's success in Web serving and now e-business--is not surprising, considering its origins at the birth of the modern Internet age, at about the same time Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the Web. Unlike Unix, Mac OS or Microsoft's DOS (the core of Windows), Linux grew up with the Web, crafted and hacked and honed by hundreds of developers around the world with html in their veins.

"Free shall make you free" was the clarion call of the original Web, before America Online jumped on the bandwagon. Torvalds and other open-source pioneers such as Richard Stallman of the GNU project and Jon "maddog" Hall--currently executive director of Linux International--heard that message, tirelessly promoting it in the burgeoning Web community. Few (except Bill Gates) could argue with the concept of freely distributed software, and small, cash-poor Internet firms were drawn to Linux like flies to feces. Web developers at those companies subsequently contributed to the ongoing refinement and expansion of Linux, priming it for expansion into Web sites and e-commerce.

"When you look at the Web server or e-business market, they're closely tied to the Internet, and that's where all the [Linux] developers are coming from too," observes Lisa Sullivan, vice president of corporate marketing at Red Hat. "Things are moving forward at such a fast rate."

Critics have questioned whether Linux can handle big-time e-business--the high volume of transactions that occur in e-procurement networks or B2B marketplaces. They have a point with the OS's current incarnation, which can't match the features, applications and technical support that Windows 2000 offers. But penguin lovers express great confidence in Version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, scheduled for release early in 2001. That update, designed for Intel's new 64-bit architecture, will run on eight-processor symmetric multiprocessing systems and support large file systems. Sullivan sees Version 2.4 as a springboard into enterprise-level e-business, threatening the domain of Sun, Hewlett-Packard and other Unix vendors (see Unix vs. Linux. "That will really position Linux as a contender where only high-end Unix has gone before," she says.

Sullivan says that she had only a vague idea of the seemingly insurmountable odds facing Linux when she joined Red Hat straight out of college in 1994. And a good job, too, or she might have gone to work for a software company with a brighter future, such as Novell or Corel. "A lot of us had not worked in technology before, so we didn't know it couldn't be done," she says. "We didn't come with preconceived notions that we're going to come in fourth place, or whatever. We said, let's give it our all … we're just going to go out there and build the best operating system we can."

Phil Davies is senior editor of ComputerUser.com.