TECHNOLOGY; An Alternative To Microsoft Gains Support In High Places

Governments around the world, afraid that Microsoft has become too powerful in critical software markets, have begun working to ensure an alternative.

More than two dozen countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, including China and Germany, are now encouraging their government agencies to use ''open source'' software -- developed by communities of programmers who distribute the code without charge and donate their labor to cooperatively debug, modify and otherwise improve the software.

The best known of these projects is Linux, a computer operating system that Microsoft now regards as the leading competitive threat to its lucrative Windows franchise in the market for software that runs computer servers. The foremost corporate champion of Linux is I.B.M., which is working with many governments on Linux projects.

Against this opposition, Microsoft has found itself in the uncommon position of campaigning for the even-handed competition of ''a level playing field.'' And I.B.M., once the feared monopolist of the era of mainframe computers, is casting itself as a force of liberation from Microsoft, the monopolist of today.

Microsoft worries that some governments may all but require the use of Linux for their powerful servers, which provide data to large networks of computer users. For the most part, the battle does not involve the kind of software that runs on the typical computer user's desk.

To curb such moves, Microsoft is backing an industry group called the Initiative for Software Choice. The group lists 20 members -- besides the chip maker Intel, a close ally, most of them small foreign companies or organizations. (Illegally stifling choice, of course, was precisely what the federal courts in the long-running antitrust case ruled that Microsoft did in the market for personal computer software.)