NEWS 09.03.99: IBM, Compaq and Novell have all made an equity investment in Red Hat, the Linux software provider.
The three join fellow IT giants, Intel, Netscape and Oracle as investors in the firm.
IBM's investment will see it working alongside Red Hat to optimise IBM hardware running Red Hat Linux.
09.03.03: Putting aside the fact that five years ago we used to cheat you with incredibly short stories, this article marked an important milestone in the growth of the mainstream Linux movement - though it was still a bastion of geekdom for some time yet.
However, major deployments of Linux have now alerted Microsoft to the fact that its monopoly on the desktop is not as safe as it once believed.
So worried was Microsoft by one recent major 'switcher' from proprietary to open source that Steve Ballmer jumped on a plane from Seattle to Munich to try to talk the city's Mayor Christian Ude out of approving and signing off the switch.
And five years later Red Hat is still on the fundraising trail. Earlier this year the company announced its latest round of funding, which brought in $600m.
