OStatic

Mozilla Messaging is looking forward to a big year in 2010 including Thunderbird 3.1 and figuring out how to make the project financially sustainable. Making Thunderbird better is the easier part. Figuring out how to make money as a project is another story entirely.

No doubt the next release of Thunderbird, currently code-named Lanikai, will do a lot to win users. Lanikai will focus on making the upgrade from Thunderbird 2 more gradual, and improving on the Thunderbird 3 platform. This means fixes for IMAP, stability and memory improvements, interface enhancements, and improvements to message filters and Smart Folders. The 3.1 release is avoiding disruptive changes and the team is shooting for a May release. The bigger challenge ahead for Moz Messaging is how to pay for itself.

The company that promised not to be evil took a serious drubbing in 2006 when it decided to censor search results in order to comply with local laws in China. Four years later, Google is having to rethink its decision. Google has made a splash with its new approach to China, but is it enough and the right approach to make a difference?

Google attracted international attention and criticism for going against its own corporate ethics to do business in China. At the time, the company said it hoped that it could make a meaningful ? though imperfect ? contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China. Google may have made some impact, but it doesn't appear that its presence has had any deep impact on access to information in China.

We've written before several times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and we've also written about Cloudera, a well-funded company that is focusing on providing support and services for Hadoop, in addition to offering its own Hadoop distribution.

Today, Cloudera announced the first ever Hadoop World conference, to take place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on October 2nd, with registration available here. A look at the companies and institutions organizing and participating in the event shows just how far Hadoop has come, and how it has extended well beyond just search applications.

While competition among smartphone operating systems is raging, with the Symbian OS, the BlackBerry OS, the iPhone OS, and Android getting top billing, Windows Mobile is seriously teetering. As GigaOm suggests, Android may very well kill Microsoft's mobile operating system. Mototorola has a huge bet on Android in the works, and appears to have little interest in Windows Mobile, and Microsoft's own top executives are acknowledging mobile missteps. Check out the details here.

In response to my post Does Chrome OS Have a Fighting Chance?, where I discussed various things that will and won't work in Google's favor as it delivers an open source operating system targeted at netbooks, a reader, in the comments, served up this pithy but thought-provoking conclusion: It stands little chance unless Google finds a way to natively run familiar Windows apps. ?

In my post, I pointed out that users won't just adopt cloud-based applications in droves, abandoning desktop applications, and I said, application usage doesn't shift entirely overnight. Still, the reader comment focuses specifically on Windows applications, and is one of many thoughts appearing online concerning Google's precise stance toward Microsoft. What is that exact stance?

One thing that both Google and Apple share is that almost the instant that they announce a new product, the public loves it. That's partly because they tend to deliver winning products, but they don't always do so. Google has shuttered a number of projects from its labs, and its productivity applications are popular, but haven't come close to toppling Microsoft Office. And remember the Apple Newton? I barely do either.

For these reasons, and because an operating system is a complex thing to build and gather support for, it makes sense to scrutinize Google's actual chances of delivering a hit with it's newly announced Chrome OS. Here are some things that will work in Google's favor, and some that will not.

PC makers to support Chrome OS. Google plans to announce within the next day or so the names of PC makers in Taiwan and China that have already signed on to work with its new Chrome operating system.

Chrome OS to emphasize security. Google claims that it will be completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS, reports ArsTechnica, including process isolation.

Codeplex the measure of Microsoft open source street cred. The company is trumpeting the success of its three year old CodePlex open source site, noting it now has over 10,000 projects.

Stop piling on Mono. Microsoft says it won't go after developers using the C# programming language and infrastructure used in the Mono implementation of .NET. So why are people ripping on Mono?

SUSE 11 takes off faster than 10. Novell delivered its SUSE Linux 11 release at the end of March, so it's now time to ask how it's doing. The answer: better than SUSE Linux 10.

Secret EU open source migration study leaked. A hush-hush study from the EU Council has made it into the wild.

8 cool tricks to make the most of Google Chrome. Coax it to use less memory and become a wizard with tabs.

Microsoft debuts open source PHP for Azure, IE8. The company has a new Software Developer Kit (SDK) for PHP on Microsoft's cloud services platform Windows Azure.

Can the enterprise open source strategy work? In associating with Red Hat, Ingres grabs a lifeline into the larger enterprise customer space.

aTunes is an unsung cross-platform audio player and manager. It makes it easy to organize music, rip audio CDs, and more.

Over at ComputerWorld, Seth Weintraub waxes poetic about Microsoft's decision to offer a Windows 7 Starter edition to keep its presence strong in the netbook arena, and why this is a huge advantage for Google's Linux-based Android.

Windows 7 Starter edition is designed to run no more than three applications simultaneously -- purchasing an upgrade allows users to run, presumably, as many apps as their netbooks can handle at one time. Now, three concurrent applications at a shot might be sufficient for a number of users; it might be all that some netbooks can handle, depending on the applications and system resources running in the background. Microsoft isn't hiding the fact it is experimenting with a limited Starter, and hopefully netbook manufacturers will also make buyers aware of this. But awareness and being almost sufficient in even most cases is irrelevant. It's the concept that there is a limit, and purchasing an upgrade for functionality that most won't need every day (but when it's needed, it's really needed) that will make netbooks running alternative operating systems increasingly attractive. It's an advantage not only for Android, but any Linux distribution netbook builders optimize for their hardware.