This looks of major interest to Linux users
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5436/Interesting news from LinuxForum 2006, during a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement...
"Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista."
If ALL of IBM switches to Linux desktops and OpenOffice... that would be a very significant loss to Microsoft; not only in direct licensing revenues, but also in speeding adoption of Linux by other companies. After all, if IBM can run on Linux desktops...
Could this be the start of some sort of haggling on a deal ?
Who knows but if its true we may all benefit from the move IBM made a while ago in releasing all its linux softare to patent free.