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What do IONA, KTI, L-3 Storm Control Systems, MySQL, Plumtree Software, General Electric, Microsoft, Remsar International, IBM, Green Hills Software and Magnolia Plastics all have in common?

They all proudly name Boeing as one of their customers. In fact, naming Boeing as a customer is a practice so widespread in the computer industry that it verges on tradition. "Boeing is so big, and buys so much stuff, that just about everybody gets to call them a customer," says Avery Lyford, president & CEO of Linuxcare.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Boeing is an important, classy company. It makes sense for suppliers to put Boeing at the tops of their lists of Important Customers.

This common practice of naming Boeing as a customer raises two questions for me. One is, If Linux were a company, and customers actually paid for the Linux kernel, who would Linux name as its most important customers? The other is, Would it be Boeing or any of the other Usual Suspects? Or would it be an endless list of names that fly below the kind of radar that's tuned to pickup big names like Boeing and GE?

I brought up those questions with my friend Allan Harrell, who lives in Phoenix, and works with the body shop and junk auto parts business. Among other things. Mostly Allan sets up computer systems and networks for people. Since lots of people want varieties of Windows, he reluctantly complies, then spends large amounts of time fixing the inevitable. In many cases, he points out, the customers have little choice. "In the body shop business, for example, there are three main software suppliers to the category. Two make stuff that runs on Windows. The other runs on SCO. Either way you're not dealing with Linux or Open Source."

One exception is the junk parts business. The big supplier there is ADP. But the #2 is FastParts. ADP runs on some kind of DOS. FastParts runs on Linux.

So I got on the phone with FastParts