News bubbled up from various media outlets late Thursday that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is willing to open the Windows source code to competitors if doing so would bring an end to the Justice Department's antitrust case against the company.

I recieved a copy of FreeBSD 3.2 a couple of months back for review and in a small conspiracy of idiocies, errors and emergencies wound up putting off the review until after the release of 3.4. Since it has taken me a month to get around to ordering a copy of 3.4 from Walnut Creek, I thought the fair thing would be to write an extended review of two or three installments and report on what I see as the "big picture", if you will. But first a little history....

"First, you get their attention." In exploring Linux, it's easy to run into things that are not only extremely useful, but impress the heck out of people -- and even scare them with the utter impossibility of what you are in fact doing.

A start-up called Eazel is at work on a graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux that founders say will extend to every aspect of the Linux computing experience. The project is an extension of the Gnome user interface. With the current Gnome and the competing KDE user interfaces for Linux, it's still hard to avoid typing in commands, an activity notoriously unpalatable to average users. Though showing some signs of growth for desktop use, Linux still is used predominantly on servers.

Microsoft would be willing to open the source code for its Windows software to competitors in order to settle the antitrust case filed by the U.S. Justice Department, chairman Bill Gates said.

GartnerGroup, which has criticized Microsoft's pricing policy for years, said the "significant" new charges for Windows would affect 90 percent of large firms over the next two years, no matter what other software products they used.

Support is arguably one of the most important concerns when dealing with the choice of an operating system for a corporate network environment. The most significant cost related to computers is neither the hardware nor the software, but rather the cost to keep these systems up and running.

...That is where wine (wine is not an emulator) would shine. It is independent from Microsoft's whims, and would enable the average consumer to retain an investment in all the software that comes on these CD-ROMs. Without allowing Microsoft to invalidate such an investment at one fell swoop in order to punish some hopeful competitor.

So, will Microsoft take that jump into the dark and start work on a new OS that can be used across a wide range of architectures, from key-ring PDAs to massive multiple CPU mainframes? Linux has shown that it's possible and not at any great cost either. I think they will and the recent shake up of the top level management within Microsoft is the first stage.

Early in January, Intel announced plans for new Intel-branded Internet appliances that would run on Linux. They also showed and demonstrated some of these at their booth at CES--the Consumer Electronics Show--in Las Vegas. It was there that I got to play around briefly with two devices: a computer-like thin client, sitting in an ersatz kitchen, and a TV set-top box in an ersatz living room. Both were beyond impressive. They were scary.