Open source: Dell won accolades when it began offering Linux pre-installed on PCs but, as Matt Asay reports, the hardware maker is only selling those systems to home users and, in fact, even refused a prospective customer who needed to use a business credit card as payment. “Why not let the market decide where Ubuntu will go today? Or was that part of some agreement with Microsoft? ‘We’ll only let individual Linux freaks buy Ubuntu — we won’t let corporate Linux freaks buy it,'” he writes in this Open Sources post. “Muppets.”Careers: Kicking off with a question John West asks If leadership is a journey, how will you know when you’re there? No easy answer, it’s true, but West does offer a benchmark of sorts, or at least an endpoint — becoming the least important person in your organization. And that’s a good thing. “So it’s a little bit of hyperbole. There are decisions and responsibilities that you must take on your own. They are the job of the person in charge.” Even for West, that takes some adjustment. Columnist’s corner: Even though he’s spent much of his career finding and disarming artificial benchmark advantages that don’t correlate to real-world computing scenarios, Tom Yager explains that, “the nut that I have yet to crack is an enterprise IT benchmark that passes the test of being portable, easy to run, consistent, realistic, fair, and capable of providing simple, meaningful results.” But Greg Leake, an ostensibly solo and even stealth Microsoft employee, is working to create such a test for both Java and .Net. “Microsoft put a lot of time and money behind someone who was more committed to shooting straight than to handing his employer a big win over a competitor,” Yager writes in J2EE against .Net. “It trusted a key competitive benchmark to an architect who made sure the competitor had every chance to win.” Technology Industry