OStatic

Check in with Chris DiBona, Google's open source chief, on how committed Google is to OSS, and more.....

Google announces OpenSocial 0.8.....

Bill Gates discussed Windows 7 at the D conference. It has a multi-touch interface--video and photos found here.....

Ruby on Rails upgrade may arrive this weekend.....

Eighteen universities say they are turning to Groundwork Open Source's network management software.....

Funambol, maker of open source messaging software, has a new version of its BlackBerry push e-mail and PIM sync app.....

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has released the first beta of KDE 4.1, which is targeted to fully replace KDE 3, when it goes final in July. Like other desktop open source projects focused on Linux and open source users, including GNOME and OpenOffice.org, KDE presents a graphical desktop interface designed for usability. The new version has many improvements to the desktop shell and is much more configurable than version 3, as described in the release notes. The KDE Personal Information Management suite is also now ported to the new version, along with quite a few other applications. Here's a look under the hood.

As we reported last month, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort has had rocky times recently. The company has just announced a partnership with Microsoft to put Windows on OLPC laptops, although Linux-based open source versions of the sub-$200 laptops will stay in production. The laptops are targeted at children in developing nations. Recently, several key executives have left the project, including former president Walter Bender. Questions swirled about Bender's reasons for leaving OLPC, but now, in a surprise twist, he has resurfaced. Bender has announced Sugar Labs, a new foundation focused on taking the Sugar user interface in the OLPC laptops to other hardware platforms.

Do you ever use public Wi-Fi hotspots? If you are increasingly using them, you have company. A study done by iPass late last year, showed that work-related hotspot usage was up 68 percent in 2007, relative to 2006. Airports topped the list of public places where users wirelessly connect. The vast majority of hotspot users, though, don't take the right steps to secure their sessions. In this post, I'll cover five free open source and freeware applications you can use to lock down your sessions.

The situation at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the organization behind the $100 laptop, looks like it's going from bad to worse. As we've reported before, key personnel have recently walked out on the project.

At the center of the conflict appears to be the issue of how deep the laptop's open source roots should be.

Recently, I got the opportunity to pose a few questions to key people involved with open source efforts at Microsoft, including Sam Ramji (the recently promoted head of Microsoft's open source and Linux efforts), Ori Amiga (Microsoft Group Product Manager, Live Developer Platform), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). They offered up some thought-provoking input on what open source needs, Novell, China, Live Mesh, and other topics. I thank them for taking the time, and please read on for their comments.

The rumors were true: Microsoft is opening up its Office 2007 suite of productivity applications to full support for other formats, including Open Document Format (ODF). Earlier this year, Microsoft was under fire for pushing its own Open Office XML set of formats as an international standard, when many people in the open source community wanted support for the more strictly open ODF standard. Microsoft officials have now also said that Office will fully support PDF format and XML Paper Specification (XPS). The new formats will arrive in Service Pack 2 for Office 2007, early next year, and some translators will arrive before then.

Fedora 9, the community-driven Linux distribution from Red Hat is out. Bruce Byfield has some interesting thoughts on it.....

Openbravo, developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point-of-Sale (PoS) solutions has received $12 million of second round funding.....

Ingres OpenROAD, the companyﾒs platform for rapid application development, is now open source.....

InformationWeek has an interesting interview with Microsoft's open source chief Sam Ramji.....

Open-Xchange and Parallels are integrating Open-Xchange open source e-mail and collaboration software with Parallels.....