NEWS The rise and rise of open source, especially the Linus operating system, dominated the year in software. But that's not to say there haven't been issues along the way, many of them legal. And other advances were made, writes Jo Best, in the areas of IM and downloading...
If anyone had a good year in 2003, it was the IT industry's lawyers, who must have rolling around naked in piles of cash and bellowing "I'm rich, rich beyond my wildest dreams, I tell you..." All of tech's big names queued up to get themselves some legal representation, with Gates, Ellison and Torvalds all gearing up for their day in court.
The father of Windows and the daddy of open source both found themselves having on the business end of the law as non-proprietary OSes swept to popularity.
While Microsoft still publicly regards its open source competitor with the tone of a condescending yet paternal relative, Torvalds and co have managed to snatch a few high profile customers from Gates' machine.
In Europe, one notable win came courtesy of the Mayor of Munich, who switched 14,000 government desktops from Windows to Linux, despite a personal visit from Steve Ballmer who cut short a skiing holiday to try and persuade Mayor Ude not to swap. Herr Ude remained intractable - and Microsoft's loss was the skiing world's gain.
On this side of the channel, other big names were flirting with jettisoning Windows, with several UK government departments, including the NHS and Whitehall, signing up to trial Linux on some of their desktops.
It was a scenario that saw itself repeated across Asia too, as after announcing a policy of homegrown software only for the domestic government, the world's most populous country voted to stick Sun's Linux offering on its desktop.
So will Linux be the next big thing on desktops? Not everyone's convinced - Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, for one as well as a significant portion of UK CIOs.
Other notable Asian victories for the Penguin saw Vietnam and South Korea ramping up to make the switch and Japan's main mobile company DoCoMo plumping for Linux too, alongside the Symbian OS.
Nevertheless, as the Linux snowball got a swerve on, the OS started to find itself getting the same kind of unwelcome attention as uber-OS Windows, as the Linux kernel came under attack from hackers.
Microsoft did manage to put in a few glory kicks of its own in the open source arena. The Redmond behemoth's ongoing spat with Lindows saw the courtroom wrangling spread across the Atlantic to European shores, culminating in a legal victory for Gates and chums as Sweden blocked the distribution of Lindows software for reasons of trademark infringement.
What's more, 2003 will forever be the year remembered for the emergence of Darl McBride. He is the CEO of SCO, which has sued IBM and claims its code is in Linux, meaning Linux users have started to receive invoices out of the blue.
Microsoft had its fair share of legal attention on the other side of the fence though, as antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic turned their attention to whether what the software company was up to is anti-competitive and should be forced to pay a multi-billion euro fine or share its code with competitors.
And while software lawyers were busy making a crust, software makers were busy making software.
Among the landmark releases fresh out of Redmond in 2003 were Microsoft's Windows Server offering and the latest version of Office, complete with emails that were rumoured to delete themselves.
But the biggest surprise package of the year could well have been Longhorn – yours for less than a quid. You didn't know it had been released? Neither did Microsoft. Pirate copies were found being sold in Malaysia for the princely sum of $1.58.
The idea of corporate use of pirated software also hit the headlines again, with companies claiming they often do it unwittingly and another study finding high-tech firms are the worst offenders.
Other software getting more than its fair share of attention from businesses worldwide was email's sharper little brother, IM. Beloved by office gossips and hard-nosed businessmen alike, IM merited its own silicon.com special report. While opinion was divided over whether IM will ever supersede email, there was no doubting that business doesn't seem to be able to get along without it, even if the potential security problems it poses are still to be fully appreciated.
Software companies and ISPs all appreciated it though, with Yahoo! and Microsoft banging out versions designed for business. There was even speculation that the decision to shut down MSN chatrooms was just a way of pushing users onto IM .
Other software applications really coming into their own this year involved music downloads, both of the legitimate and under the counter variety. While Kazaa and associates were experiencing something of a downturn thanks to the efforts of the RIAA and its subpoena-wielding legal team, tech's big names were scrapping to get their slice of the download pie.
Among the contenders looking to muscle in on the market were AOL, Microsoft, Dell and, bizarrely, Coke and McDonalds respectively. Still, when it comes to downloads, there's only one name that measures up, apparently, and that's iTunes.
Steve Jobs' baby, launched back in April , took the legal download sector by storm, even teaming up with arch rival Gates' outfit to shift some songs – and more importantly iPods – our way. The year closed on a high for iTunes as it hit 25 million downloads in the nine months since its launch.
