Something tells us Michael Dell may be coming off Bill Gates' Christmas card list. If returning Windows XP to the list of options for new computers wasn't enough, we heard today that Dell is going to start offering the Ubuntu version of Linux on selected notebooks in the US very soon.

That Dell is able to do this at all shows how big and confident the company has become. When I have spoken with other manufacturers on the subject of alternative operating systems, I was told that the terms of their license agreement with Microsoft forbid them from selling computers without an operating system. And by that, they mean Windows.

Now the official line from Microsoft is that a computer sold without an operating system is destined to be used with a pirated version of Windows. So maybe Microsoft will be satisfied because the computers are quite obviously not going to have a pirated copy of Windows installed.

No, somehow I can't quite believe that.