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When Yodlee.com was looking for an operating system to power its Web site, the company -- founded by former Microsoft and Amazon executives -- bypassed Windows NT and turned instead to Linux.

The start-up, which aggregates and manages online accounts for Web surfers, needed tough, reliable software that could serve up information from a multitude of sites. And they needed it on the cheap.

"We didn´t have a lot of capital, and Linux is a low-cost operating system we can run on any machine," says Matt Idema, a Yodlee vice president. One copy of Linux costs about $80 and can be copied as often as needed. A Microsoft Windows 2000 upgrade will cost companies $970 to $1,640 per computer, Giga Information Group estimates.

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