Doubts expressed  by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and senior kernel developer Alan Cox, who both said it would not look good to have Ballmer on the board, were brushed aside by Rowe. "Look, we need the right kind of economic drivers in place to ensure that we have a 21st century operating system, not some piece of crap that needs rebooting all the time, even when you reconfigure a network interface," he said.

When a correspondent from the Daily Wag, Honduras' premier tabloid, asked whether this was code for "we pay Torvalds, and hence we will call the tune," Rowe simply smiled. "Linux is all about code, beautiful code, so you can figure it out, boy," he said.

The next appointee to the board is expected to be Miguel de Icaza, the co-founder of the GNOME desktop enviroment and founder of the Mono project, a re-creation of Microsoft's .NET development environment for Linux. "I am a supporter of the environment. Anything that has the word in it, will have my backing," de Icaza told a friendly journalist, in keeping with his policy of never speaking to the media unless he is guaranteed favourable coverage.

(Efforts to yank a statement out of him for the other media, using methods sanctioned by the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were unsuccessful).

Later, de Icaza, informed his friendly journalist he had something more to say. "I will be repurposing collaborative infrastructures so that we at Mono can exploit web-enabled eyeballs. All my life I have been enhancing value-added niches and I will continue to do so, provided Microsoft is involved," he said.

Asked if something had been lost in translation from Spanish, de Icaza refused to answer.

Ballmer referred to the statement made by former OSDL head Stuart Cohen describing the group as the "centre of gravity of Linux."

"I can't help but feel that this is my rightful niche. We are the people who do the most to upset the centre of gravity of Linux by our outrageous statements which are propagated by every consultant east of the Suez Canal. Hell, we should have been here long ago," he said.

Free Software Foundation chief Richard Stallman said the move to include Ballmer on the board was "just another cunning stunt.""They tried to gain exposure and marketshare for Linux by using Paris Hilton and failed so how would Ballmer succeed?" he asked.

{moscomment}

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