It's the perfect promotion for Linux - and also for the Marvel Comics hero, if he needed any. Iron Man is going head-to-head with Linux.

In his venerable forty-five year career, Iron Man has always kept a finger somewhere near the technology pulse. In his 1960s incarnation, millionaire inventor Tony Stark gained incredible strength, "repulsor rays", and the power of flight, all due to the magic power of "transistors" (which also acted as his heart pacemaker, if I remember rightly).

Presumably in the 1970s and 80s, he got even more powerful, thanks to integrated circuits. Certainly, in the 1990s, he went a bit cyberpunk with virtual reality storylines, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and alcohol (somewhere, surely, he may have become a convicted monopolist, but I fell asleep somewhere in his oh-so-thorough Wikipedia page, so I'll never know).

Anyway, according to Comic Book Resources, the next bad guy to take on Iron Man will be an "open source ideological terrorist" called Zeke Stane, who who is "the open source to Stark’s closed source oppressiveness"

Stane "has no headquarters, no base, and no bank account. He’s a true ghost in the machine; completely off the grid, flexible, and mobile," says Iron Man writer Matt Fraction. "That absolutely flies in the face of Tony’s received business wisdom and in the way business is done. There are banks and lawyers and you have facilities and testing. Stane is a much more different animal. He’s a much smarter, more mobile and much quicker to respond and evolved futurist.”

That's a clear open source ideology, and an open source bad guy caused some consternation when Computerworld spotted this.

But the bottom line must be good, according to one poster there: "Think about it, if you tell kids that something is bad they WILL try it."