The Wall Street Journal today (May 28, 2009) published a review of multiple Linux netbooks. Overall, I think the review offers fair, balanced coverage of what's right - and wrong - with the Linux netbook market today. But there was one line in the review that I found completely misleading and shortsighted.

The details are sketchy, and the two companies are not confirming or denying that something is going down, but the Wall Street Journal broke a story last Tuesday, right smack dab in the middle of the opening session of Sun Microsystems' CommunityOne East developer conference in New York, that IBM was in talks to shell out between $7.4 billion and $8.2 billion to acquire Sun.

When Walt Mossberg talks, people listen. He's the big tech writer at the Wall Street Journal, and ... having the WSJ report on Linux and Ubuntu is huge.

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux.

Details about the Mandriva-Nigeria story surface in the Wall Street Journal

Many of us have been saying for a long time that Microsoft's Windows product would be better if the company open sourced it. But today marks the first day that the Wall Street Journal has chimed in to second the motion:

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield broke a story on Microsoft selling a group of patents to a third party. The end result of this story is good for Linux, even though it doesn’t placate fears of ongoing attacks by Microsoft.

Harsh economic conditions tend to accelerate technology shifts, so the top brass at Red Hat were a pretty chipper bunch as they explained to Wall Street how they intend to make money in the coming years.

It's hard to compete for attention with the drama of the big bailout and this presidential race. But bubbles are news, at least when they burst. The patent bubble hasn't burst, but judging by last week's Wall Street Journal story on Intellectual Ventures, it's getting pretty big.