OStatic

As some OStatic readers have likely already heard, Microsoft is taking TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices, to court for patent infringement. This is especially disturbing to those in the open source world for at least two reasons -- Microsoft's previous claims that Linux violates over two hundred patents it currently holds, and three of the claims against TomTom deal with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel in its products.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick presents some good analysis of the story, including links to the patents in question and those with particularly tenuous claims (in terms of infringement and patentability, in a few instances). While this is worrisome to those who use Linux, and certainly causing TomTom executives to lose sleep, I can't help but wonder, really, what this positioning actually means. Why is this coming up now? If hundreds of Microsoft patents are being violated, why go after a company infringing on eight (with three relating directly to Linux)? And why TomTom?

Open source Lucene threatens Microsoft, Google enterprise search. Interest in Lucene and Solr is skyrocketing, as measured by job postings.

Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline. Why is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?

Firefox 3.5's first vulnerability self-inflicted. The bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser.

Embedded Linux achieves one-second boot time. MontaVista Software announced and showed a dashboard application going from cold boot to operational in one second flat.

Boxee will blow you away. In many ways, the Boxee media center platform is much better than the original XBMC 9.04 RC.

24 open source apps for Asus netbooks. Good tools for Windows and Linux systems.

Apache better than GPL for open source business? What's the optimal license for commercial open source projects?

Linux fast-boot tech targets Windows users. Xandros' Presto utility can power up Windows notebooks and netbooks in seconds.

ReactOS improves its open source Windows clone. The operating system's server version has a very low memory footprint.

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is available. It features excellent hardware compatibility and the KDE 4.2 desktop environment.

Cisco declares war, embraces open source. It has a new Unified Computing initiative, and although the technology is proprietary, open source software plays a role.

Intellectual property and open source. Read an excerpt from the award-winning book of the same name.

Apache's ongoing licensing bout with Sun. The recently updated Java Specification Requests (JSRs) show that a battle continues.

15 interesting facts about the Linux kernel. Only two percent was written by Linus Torvalds.

Could Cloudera become the open source Asia? Its talent pool runs deep.

Last October, Sam introduced us to Cloudera, a company founded by highly-decorated industry veterans hoping to bring Hadoop's data processing power to a variety of businesses. Though Cloudera came into existence just last summer, it has already closed a $5 million round of Series A funding led by Accel Partners.

Cloudera has started offering commercial support for its Hadoop distribution along with a free, community-supported edition.

While certainly the names and resumes of Cloudera's founders -- Oracle and Sleepycat's Mike Olson, Google's Christophe Bisciglia, Yahoo!'s Amr Awadallah, and Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher -- helped the fledging company secure attention and funding, don't discount that Cloudera also fills a market need.

As the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco gets underway this week, the tech publication is posting a series of interesting transcripts from roundtable discussions on open source topics. The roundtables include a number of well-known pundits, including CNet writer Matt Asay, Bruce Perens (credited by many as coining the term open source), Sam Ramji (senior director of platform technology at Microsoft), Zack Urlocker (vice president of products at MySQL) and many others. Much of the talk surrounds the trend toward commercialization of open source products.