>>Right you are, Jeff. Just look at the latest headlines in the UT news section. Dell and a major airline have invested in Linux as well. Many governments are going the Linux route and the department of defense is using StarOffice instead of MS Office.
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>>The pendulum has swung. The open source/anti-MS momentum is gaining. Perhaps I should reconsider my career and training objectives (.NET consulting) and bite the bullet for a major development shift...
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>One way to start is by creating a another partition on your hard drive and installing either Red Hat (my preference - it's great to actually be able to have a preference), SuSE, or Mandrake Linux. These installations have become painless. Then, install the KDE desktop. The distributions usually come with at least one desktop (again, it's nice to have a preference). I don't know about the others, but Red Hat also comes with StarOffice as well as a lot of other stuff (e.g. Borland's J-Builder) depending what package you select. You may want to take a look at Red Hat's Tux Web Server - it blows the socks off of both IIS and Apache in Lab tests.
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>This is just a recommended start. For me, I am not smart enough to participate in kernel development - I wish I was. My talent has been and always will be developing robust business apps and that is the reason why I love VFP. However, times-are-a-changing and I am having to make a decision between .NET and the Linux world. I wish I had what it takes to do both, but I don't.

Thanks for the advice Jeff. I'll probably be purchasing a new PC in the late fall and will consider partitioning the drive so I can have Linux (Red Hat probably) with KDE desktop coexist with Win XP.

I'd like to think I can make some headway on both dev platforms (open source & .NET) to broaden my prospects in the ever-shrinking software development market.

-JT