Vijay Shekhar, who runs a team of 60 people sending scores to cricket-crazy fans through India's booming cell phone networks, feared that using cheap Linux software for his business could cause problems. Instead, Shekhar says he loves the Linux operating system after paying only a tenth of the 400,000-rupee ($8,703) cost of the competing Windows package from Microsoft Corp.

About 10 percent of India's personal computers will be sold with Linux rather than Microsoft operating systems by March, 2004, says Linux distributor Red Hat Inc (Nasdaq:RHAT - news), up from nothing in January. Besides the plain switch of desktop operating systems to Linux, analysts say the bigger worry for Microsoft is the growing use of Linux among India's pool of an estimated 400,000 software developers, many of whom churn out code for giants such as General Motors (NYSE:GM - news) and American Express (NYSE:AXP - news). Linux could use India as a back door into the lucrative global business software market as Indian programmers, hunting for low-cost programming tools, use it as their basic system and introduce it to customers.