| Sumario: | Ray Noorda, the retired head of Novell, the fourth-largest software company in the world, is opposed to Microsoft, the largest, because he believes that Microsoft's aggressive attempts to dominate the software market are hurting everyone. Over the past six months, Noorda has quietly invested in two new companies—Caldera and Willow Software—that are developing an alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system. Noorda's two companies may have succeeded in developing a complex operating system in such a short space of time, because they based it on a publicly available operating-system core called Linux and used technology and some of the people who had been involved in a related project at Novell. The new operating system allows programmers to simply convert the programs that have already been written, a form of “cross-platform” coding that has long been a goal of the software industry.
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