Two counter-claims spotted in the blogosphere today causes me to revisit this seemingly quiet battlefield again, although I bring no conclusions or opinions to the matter. You be the judge!

First, Sun's Jonathan Schwartz says he is meeting with more and more customers who are finding guerilla open source projects in their businesses and finally surrendering to what the engineers seem to be saying: take a closer look at open source software and formalize the adoption strategy. A clear win for open source!

But then we have the Seattle PI's Todd Bishop reporting on a line from Steve Ballmer at last week's Microsoft briefing for Wall Street analysts. "Nobody talks as much today about the risks in our business that come from Linux and open source. They're still there, they're going to be there every day, and yet we've done a very, very good job, I think, in the marketplace versus those risks," said Ballmer. And indeed this seems to be the case; the market isn't concerned much anymore with any threat to Redmond from the Linux monster. A clear win for Microsoft!

So, which is it? Microsoft triumphant, or open source ascendant?