There may soon be a big push for Linux and open source from the government: it is starting to publish papers arguing against proprietary systems. We will all have to take this seriously, because it will impact on public sector clients and those clients who themselves support the public sector.

The financial community is also moving in this direction, with the likes of Merrill Lynch recently embracing Linux as a server operating system.
Even at law firms that are massively focused on Microsoft, Linux and other open source alternatives may be finding a niche.

At Addleshaw Booth & Co, the IT helpdesk system runs on a MySQL database, because it works well and there is no reason that it has to be a Microsoft database. The reason the firm is so Microsoft-bound is primarily because nearly all of our clients are using Microsoft Word. Take a client-server solution, such as a document management system: it does not have to run on SQL Server databases and Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.