The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two.

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure for IT cost bloat: moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which could then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes.

A Canadian alternative to the much talked about "one hundred dollar laptop" is making the rounds of the region in the hope of winning support from governments by offering a different solution to bridge the digital divide.

DataDyne.org's work in Zambia, switching all health care surveys from paper to pda with the help of the open source EpiSurveyor!