Big Blue places $1 billion bet on Linux ... BY DAN GILLMOR, Mercury News -- For about an hour at the start of the IBM Technical Developer Conference Tuesday morning, a casual listener might have been forgiven for thinking he or she was at another kind of event entirely: a celebration of the GNU/Linux operating system. IBM is investing a huge amount of money and talent -- a reported $1 billion this year, including the efforts of hundreds of employees -- into Linux, as the software is more generally known. And, as was evident at the San Francisco conference, IBM executives are roaming the globe to boost a technology their company doesn't own and can't possibly control.