OStatic

Open source, features to drive smartphone market. In-Stat sees 412 million smartphones by 2014, with open source playing a big role.

PortableApps adds non-open source apps, sort of. Freeware makes its way into the suite, which won four of SourceForge's recent Community Choice awards.

Can open source software save democracy? Mitch Kapor delivers open source voting system software.

Will OpenSolaris survive Oracle? With Oracle preparing to take over Sun, we should consider the fate of the OS.

Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? What does a Linux company, which Oracle is, want to do with its newly purchased Sun operating system?

Google releases open source NX server. Amid the fanfare of the Chrome OS announcement, Google quietly released an open source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display.

HP releases $500 Linux netbook onto Aussie market. This week sees the Australian launch of the Mini 110, which HP is offering with both Ubuntu and Windows XP.

Free operating systems that aren't Linux. There are other free options such BSD, OpenSolaris, HaikuOS, ReactOS, and PureDarwin.

Chrome, Android have different jobs, Google says. Android has features unique to running mobile devices, and one doesn't replace the other, a Google mobile executive says.

I can safely say when I covered the speculation that IBM and Sun were wrapping up the finer points of the acquisition Friday, I figured that if there was anything left to say come Monday, it would deal with idiosyncracies of the agreed-upon terms. Even though the announcement is imminent reports were not officially sanctioned by IBM or Sun, there was no reason to believe the sources were dishonest about the information they gave. It still doesn't seem there was dishonesty, or that these sources made wildly off-base assumptions about what was to come. It seemed as though IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems was set to proceed, until late Saturday evening, when IBM and Sun broke off negotiations, according to Bloomberg.

There had been much debate about how an IBM acquisition would affect Sun's open source efforts. As those questions move even further into the hypothetical realm, far more troubling questions loom about Sun's next potential buyer -- or its choice to weather the storm on its own.

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems is imminent. The official announcement and terms of the acquisition will most likely be made public on Monday, but a late in the day announcement hasn't been ruled out. It's estimated that the purchase will cost IBM nearly $7 billion.

There's been much speculation and discussion both here at OStatic and elsewhere about what this means for Sun and its open source projects.

Obama's inauguration must have brought out the optimist in tech journalists. In the last week, Ron Miller and Charles Babcock have written to implore Microsoft to open source Windows. While inspired and with some solid reasoning, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Here's why.

Red Hat's Google Web Toolkit play: The untold story of world domination.....

Sun upgrades OpenSolaris, signs OEM deal with Toshiba.....

The best Linux/FOSS podcasts of 2008.....

A leap forward--Mozilla's Thunderbird 3 E-mail beta.....

Amarok media player gets a facelift.....

According to The Register, Sun plans on laying off between 15-18% of its workforce (an estimated 5,000-6,000 positions) and restructuring itself into three major divisions, thanks to earlier periods of slowed growth (or losses) and the already bleak economic picture.

Sun's President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz says that this is a decisive action in the face of the economy, and that these cuts should facilitate the delivery of key open source platform innovations, including MySQL. In his corporate blog, however, Schwartz drops a few hints about other projects, such as OpenOffice.