As the industry grows there are a select group of business leaders that are making the industry what it is today and will be responsible for the direction and success of the industry going forward. Here are the open source business leaders who matter the most as 2008 begins.

CIO.com asked the lead guys for each distro about its suitability for business use. In "Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The Business OS for Flexibility and Value" Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of engineering, Red Hat makes his case that Red Hat is the choice for reducing operating costs and providing a secure, reliable, scalable operating system.

So, you have all this wonderful FOSS/Linux know how and a passion for it. Your passion is so great that you want to make a living doing it. That is sooo cool. But before you do, you need to learn how to boil to water and develop a solid business model around it so you can actually make money.

I would have liked to have been able to tell you in great detail exactly what desktops and laptops will soon be coming from Hewlett-Packard equipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.

Nora Denzel says open-source software is changing the landscape of an industry led by Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S.

Hewlett-Packard, the world's Number 1 PC maker, will try selling pre-loaded Linux on PCs in several countries as it expands a test program -- evaluating a market that some competitors have already entered -- and moves its personal computer business into a new generation of form factors and functionality.

Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux distributions.

Since the main point of the Free Software Foundation's new GPL3 (General Public License 3) is to prevent "TiVo-isation," this surely does not come as a surprise. TiVo says: "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business."