>>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.
>>
>>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...
>
>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.
>
>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.

Jeff,
You may want to consider Kylix with PostgreSQL if you are into rolling your own business apps into a turnkey solution. If you know C++ then KDevelop 2.2 against PostgreSQL is a great solution. 99% of the cash ends up in your pockets, the client pays you for your app and you can install Linux on their PCs as a free service. A win-win for both you and your clients.