The open source industry in 2008 will be marked by more news out of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other big IT vendors, less start-up funding, more M&A activity, and an increasingly serious talent shortage.

It's been at least a week since the last bout of Microsoft FUD hit the wires, so I guess it was time for a new wave. Today's FUD comes from an article Microsoft released on how its security compares with that of Linux. It should come as no surprise that Windows comes off as the Second Coming while Linux is left on the wrong side of Acheron.

While Vista worries lead some IT pros to consider Mac OS X and Linux as alternatives, technology professionals will be facing different kind of technology barrier should they decide to adopt Mac OS X and Linux instead of Microsoft Vista.

The software industry in the future will be dominated by two types of software platform - open-source Linux and the proprietary Microsoft Windows platform - said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft's charge into the high performance computing game continues at pace. The software maker this week announced that its new cluster operating system - HPC Server 2008 - based on Windows Server 2008 will ship next Summer. In addition, the code dandy has fired up a Parallel Computing Initiative to develop more parallelized software for both HPC and business users.

"Fundamentally this particular study will over-count Windows share and undercount Linux. Al Gillen at IDC, who we have a lot of respect for, says this himself in your article. Why is Linux so under-counted in this research?"

Ballmer's statement -- along with follow-up claims by Microsoft executives that they had found violations of 235 patents in Linux and other open-source software -- caused a sudden refrosting of what had been a slowly thawing relationship between the company and the open-source community.

It’s been a while since Microsoft signed up any more Linux distro vendors to participate as patent-protection partners. But on October 22, the Redmondians announced they’ve added TurboLinux to the fold.