If you’re running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner (IT) thinks you might want to make sure your employees’ avatars aren’t dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

“Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments,” a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report “Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success” explained.

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Personal computer sales in the June quarter were probably about average for this time of year, writes Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope this morning in a note to clients, and he expects Apple (AAPL) to be “best in show” among PC vendors in the quarter.

Best in show is a term you give to dogs, but I’m sure that wasn’t the implication here.

Shope is expecting a 3 percent quarter-over-quarter decline globally in PC units in the three months ended in June, and he notes that Gartner (IT) will unveil a preliminary read on June-quarter PC sales next Thursday, July 16. For the second half of the year, he sees an 8.5 percent pickup in PC units, which is certainly an improvement but below the 10.1 percent average increase over the last decade, he notes.

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Intel (INTC) certainly isn’t immune from the downturn in the economy–a decline which both IDC and Gartner today said will result in a big dropoff in 2009 semiconductor industry revenue.

But Barclays Capital analyst Tim Luke today asserted that Intel might not be hurt quite as badly as some other chipmakers.

Luke wrote in a research note that while PC and microprocessor demand during the second half 2009 is likely to be “muted,” he says that “channel and Asia checks” find “broadly in line” Q1 trends. He sees support for the stock from some restocking of inventory in Q2, troughing revenues and margins, a strong competitive position, robust cash generation and a 4.5 percent dividend.

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Admit it. When you read that headline–“Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source”–you assumed that was a good thing, right? Who’s afraid of enterprises saving a lot of money and getting much more flexible IT for their IT budgets?

Gartner, apparently. According to Gartner, that widespread adoption is cause for alarm, as Glyn Moody rightly notes (and pillories). Somehow, Gartner assumes that if 85 percent are using open source and 69 percent don’t have a formal open-source management team, the world is going to end.

As Moody notes, however, IT organizations have virtually nothing to worry about when adopting open source:

“About a dozen times a year,” [Software Freedom Law Center general counsel Eben] Moglen says, “somebody does something [that] violates the GPL. Most of the time, they’re doing so inadvertently, they haven’t thought through what the requirements are. And I call them up and I say, ‘Look, you’re violating the GPL. What you need to do is this. Would you help us?’” The answer is invariably yes, he says.

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Worldwide smartphone sales grew 15.7 percent in Q2 from a year earlier, Gartner announced this morning. The research firm says smartphones remained 11 percent of the mobile device market–unchanged from a year earlier.

Gartner analyst Robert Cozza noted in a statement that the growth rate has slowed due to the difficult macro economy. “The current economic environment continues to negatively impact the market,” he says, “limiting consumer spending and replacement purchases in general.”

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Worldwide server sales rose 12.2 percent, year over year, to 2.3 million units, in the second quarter, declares research firm Gartner (IT) in a note today, while revenue was up 5.7 percent for a total of $13.8 billion. The main driver was the replacement of x86 servers, a trend that began in the first quarter, notes Gartner, but the expansion of data centers backing Web sites was also an important factor, as was growth in emerging markets.

IBM (IBM) held onto the top revenue spot, with 31.2 percent of revenue, up 11.5 percent from last year’s 29.6 percent. HP’s (HPQ) share of the dollars, yen and shekels fell to 27.6 percent from 28.4 percent on 3 percent revenue growth.

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