A recent post over at CBR News (that's Comic Book Resources in case you're not into that sort of thing) has more than a couple bloggers amused if not slightly perturbed by the description of the new villain up against Iron Man, Tony Stark.

[Tony Stark] wants to give the world all this amazing technology but he’s nervous when anybody wants to use it... Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist

hmm... open source and terrorist in the same sentence? Now I'm paying attention! :)

Writer Matt Fraction goes on:

He has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn’t want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete. Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop.

Is this some sort of amazingly genius product placement? Maybe the perceived struggle between the "evil corporation" and the somewhat anarchistic open source community has become part of the social fabric.

I am particularly intrigued by the connection Fraction makes between youth and open source technology.

Everybody was older or the same age as Tony and a technologist isn’t going to be fighting the old guys. It’s going to be the new kid with the new idea. Microsoft doesn’t buy up older companies. They’re always buying up the new kids. So I wanted to introduce a kind of new kid aspect.”

You can follow up on this battle between good(?) and evil(?) with the full story.