Photos: The battle for the Golden Penguin Bowl

The host of the event, Samba co-founder Jeremy Allison, plays the part of Mr Money with dollar sunglasses and a suit decorated with a dollar bill print.

Representing the geek team are Mark Fasheh, Greg Burd and Charles Lamb from Sleepycat Software, the open source company that was recently bought by Oracle. Tongue in cheek, Allison introduces them as members of the Berkeley DB product line, "which Oracle will soon kill."

The nerd team — MySQL co-founder Brian Aker, his colleague Jay Pipes, and Ted Tso, a Linux kernel hacker from IBM — concentrate on working out the answer to a question.

The geeks and the nerds are tested on the four pillars of geekdom — computers, science fiction, comic books and space. This was the answer to the question: "what technology company has its own song book?"

The nerds sing along to "Ever Onward IBM".

As might be expected at a Linux conference, Microsoft was the butt of quite a few jokes, including mentions of Steve Ballmer throwing chairs and the display of unflattering pictures Bill Gates, including this one, from when he was arrested in 1977.

Other questions mocked aspects of Microsoft's strategy, such as its interoperability initiative. Allison asked the question: "Due to their new focus on interoperability how many developers did Microsoft send to the CIFS conference last year?", then acerbically answered, "None of course. Remember, talking about interoperability is as good as doing interoperability."

Oracle and Google did not escape lightly either. This unflattering photo of Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison kept popping up all over the place, and Google was criticised for giving into the Chinese government's censorship demands.

Intel was teased for not meeting expectations with Itanium, with this image displayed in response to the question: "What existing new EPIC-design CPU was expected to reach $33bn in revenues by 1999, and had only made $1.6bn by 2004?"

No LinuxWorld quiz would be complete without a picture of the founding father of Linux, Linus Torvalds. Allison displayed this image of Torvalds, in response to one question and proclaimed, "I think we should hail our glorious leader."

The Oracle nerds had a strong lead over the MySQL geeks for most of the quiz, but the geeks managed to pull ahead in the final round of the contest to walk away with the prize of the golden penguins.