VA Linux and Penguin Computing backed farther away from the desktop and laptop business, but with Dell, IBM and other mass market hardware makers starting to put Linux on their branded laptops, that was probably a good idea. The much smaller Tuxtops made the same move, and got out of the laptop business. But all of them were still in business. Linux persists because it's real. It was real before the dot com craze, and it's still real after the crash.
Demand is huge and growing.
Sun Microsystems now has at least one of its tentacles in the Linux camp, thanks to its acquisition of Cobalt, which invented the server appliance category and whose boxes all run Linux. This all amounts to a bargain of sorts. The expo itself was twice the size of last year's boom town. It's the way the essentially free and open infrastructure we call the Net manifests as an equally free, open and universal operating system. If you're selling anything other than operating systems, it's probably good for you, in the same way as the Internet is good for any business not directly competing directly with it.