A long-time campaigner against drug use in sport, publicly Christie has not offered any explanation for the drug test findings. The judgment of the three- man disciplinary panel examining his case is expected this week.Jayne Pearce, a spokeswoman for UK Athletics, confirmed that the chain of custody was discussed at Christie's hearing. It is understood that the athlete and his lawyers criticised the chain of custody, the documentation that was supposed to accompany the test sample from the Dortmund meeting to the Olympic-accredited laboratory in Cologne. This would amount to an attack on the fundamental procedures of doping control.

With all laboratory analyses being done "blind", urine samples are identified only by code numbers contained on the accompanying paperwork. The Red Hat IPO and its subsequent $4.5bn valuation haschanged the open source culture for ever Let's hope that it will notkill it altogether.. LINFORD CHRISTIE'S defence against the charge that he used the anabolic steroid nandrolone before an indoor athletics meeting earlier this year may have been as simple as to say that the urine sample which tested positive for high levels of the banned drug was not his Christie's hearing was held in London on Friday. However, he has made it clear on numerous occasions thatthis is unlikely to happen, leaving the door wide open for commercial Linuxcompanies which eventually may take the product from the community that hasdeveloped it. For them, the worry is the lost time in customertraining, support, the cost and hassle of changing to another userinterface if the one they have originally chosen is not going to win thewar. Although the price for the Linux is low (since it is open sourcesoftware, companies don't have to pay for the software per se, as inthe case of Windows NT), the loss of face by the corporate IT buyer whomade the wrong choice, the frustration of the end user who is having to learnanother system and the time it takes to reinstall a new interface are not exactlycareer enhancers for the IT bosses. One of the ways of making life moredifficult for companies with ambitious designs on "owning" Linux would befor Linus Torvalds to take charge of the whole lot including interfaces, notjust the kernel. That is typically the firststep in preparing the ground for "owning" the interface and, withit, owning the customers. Add to that the current wars among thenon-commercial Gnome and KDE in its own right, and the combination leadsto a lot of worried corporate IT buyers who don't really want to be caught inanother version war, even if it is the user interface and not the kernel thatmay start diverging.

VA's president wasnot forthcoming as to how his company was going to square the VA user interfacewith Gnome or KDA, saying that these were early days for Linuxinterfaces. Both KDE and Gnome are highly advanced developments, and itseems unlikely that VA lacks a clear perception on which direction it is likelyto take. Since VA Linux is also a Linux systems maker, it can enforce itsviews through the systems it makes, without asking anybody for permission todeviate from the leading two interface models. The reviews were solidly supportiveof KDE, and from a user's point of view it feels as if Microsoft ActiveDesktop has come home at last - nice and stable, with great functionalityand consistency. However, that was not enough for one of thepre-IPO contenders, VA Linux, which has been making noises about itsown attempt at providing a different user interface.