After weeks of aggressive posturing and months of strategic maneuvering, two leading embedded Linux companies, Lineo and MontaVista Software, squared off in a high-profile public relations shoot-out this week.

When open-source developers and IBM took gambles on each other, free software showed it can flourish in the heartland of corporate computing.

Having a Linux offering is a real interesting opportunity, because the open source movement of Linux gives customers the ability to add, customize and deploy a

very unique solution for their organization.

According to Microsoft president and chief executive Steve Ballmer, Sun, IBM, Oracle, America Online and "the phenomenon of Linux" are currently the biggest threats to the software giant.

Linux will be the fastest growing software platform, with its market earnings tipped to increase by 33 per cent over the next four years to $US3.39 billion, a Salomon Smith Barney report says.

Linux is not a serious threat to Windows and is unlikely to ever be a true competitor, according to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

The latest version of Cplant Antarctica, the upwardly mobile computer at Sandia, is expected by researchers to become the 20th fastest in the world after integrating, 1300 off-the-shelf computers recently arrived from Compaq.

Reports on developer newsgroups suggest that the latest chip stepping of Intel's Itanium processor is causing problems for Linux developers whose code worked fine with stepping A2.

Based on my experiences 'selling' Open Source the last few years, it's a simple

bullet list of do's & dont's that might be useful to people who have to present

Open Source solutions to customers or management.

KDE is not a problem now, but there are possible problems for some parts of KDE

in regard to use of the GPL. I believe these problems can be solved, and since I am not against KDE, I would like them to be solved.