Burlington has placed an order with Dell for 1,250 of its Optiplex desktop PCs to be used for office management, administering its Baby Registry, and handling back office shipping and receiving functions. All 1,250 PCs will be delivered with the Linux operating system installed by Dell.

This is the first big order for Dell's new Linux preload program. You can bet they'll be hearing about this from Microsoft when it comes time to renew their Windows license, but Department of Justice actions have taken some of the teeth out of Microsoft threats.

Burlington Coat joins a growing movement among larger corporations to move away from Windows. Many are developing custom applications using Java, some are using IBM's WSOD (Workspace On Demand) with OS/2, or NCs (Network Computers) from IBM, Sun and Corel. All agree that Windows must go because it costs too much to maintain.

Some of the major companies announcing Linux support in the last few months are: IBM, Oracle, Informix, Corel, SAP, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems and Sybase. All of these companies are porting their primary software products to Linux. IBM is also authorizing their huge Global Services division to support Linux distributions from Caldera, Red Hat, S.u.S.I and Pacific HighTech (Turbo Linux).