The more established American Linux companies are also very aware of the rapidly growing demand for Linux products in Latin America. Caldera is one of the most active corporations in the region, and with the recent acquisition of SCO, may be in the best position to dominate the enterprise market, which has consumers with enough money to purchase proprietary software. Caldera plans to use SCO's old sales and support force in Latin America to migrate SCO's customers to Caldera Linux. Currently, SCO Unix is prevalent at many corporations throughout the region. While Linux is known as a great operating system in the server and embedded space, Latin Americans are increasingly adopting it on the desktop as well.
Specific figures are hard to come by, but the signs of growing awareness of Linux are there.
In Brazil, supermarket newsstands are frequently filled with magazines that feature Linux on the cover, or on CDs enclosed in the pages. In the Latin American market, it looks as though Connectiva and Mandrake are the distributions of choice for home users, though Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE are making inroads as well. Personal computers have less than a 10 percent penetration in even the largest Latin American markets, but that number is rapidly increasing. Brazil and Argentina are working hard to help their citizens gain access to computers. The Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology recently presented President Fernando Enrique Cardoso with a computer specification intended to be affordable for all Brazilians, not just the wealthy elite.