OStatic

There appears to be no stopping the success Asus is having with its Eee PC subnotebooks. The company is forecasting this week that it will nearly double shipments of the svelte, low-cost machines in the second quarter. Shipments will rise to between 1.2 million to 1.3 million units, the company says, and it expects to move a whopping 5 million units this year. To put that in perspective, Asus shipped 350,000 units in the fourth quarter. Originally all Linux-based, the company will deliver a Windows-based Eee PC in early May. Can we expect the Linux versions to stick around?

On the heels of our prediction, open source Java is quickly heading into Linux distros. Sun Microsystems, Canonical and Red Hat have announced the inclusion of OpenJDK-based implementations in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support Server and Desktop editions.....Microsoft is using open source to extend systems management to Linux.....Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, discusses his company's move to 100 percent open source software development.....Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth weighs in on MicroHoo.....

Chip maker VIA has unveiled the beta version of its VIA Linux Portal, an open source driver development site.....What's next for Linux file systems now that Hans Reiser has been convicted of first degree murder in the death of his wife?.....Social networking and open source are cut from the same cloth says Ringside Networks' co-founder.....Fonality, a leading provider of open source VoIP phone systems, has launched its open source telephony ecosystem.....Nominations remain open for the OSCON open source awards.....

Awards are on their way for top contributions to open source. Google and O'Reilly are calling for nominations for 2008 open source awards.....Would a synchronized release schedule benefit Linux distros and open source in general?.....Windows or open source is not even the question....Second open source HD movie set for release in May.....

Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz took the stage at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday, and OStatic staff was on hand. Sun, of course, has aggressively embraced open source software in its post-Scott McNealy period, as evidenced by its $1 billion acquisition of MySQL.

Schwartz discussed ongoing open source efforts at Sun, current work being done with Linus Torvalds, MySQL, and even the future of blogging at the conference.

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today, Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker gave an address on opening the mobile web, which Webware did a nice job of analyzing. Many people have been wondering if Mozilla will deliver a version of the Firefox browser to work with the many Linux-based phones currently in the works, including phones based on Google's Android platform. While Baker didn't concretely confirm those details, she did discuss an upcoming mobile browser from Mozilla, to arrive later this year, code-named Fennec. (A Fennec is a small fox--get it?)

Just in advance of its annual JavaOne conference, Sun has leaked the news that it is finally planning a really-truly, no-fingers-crossed, open source version of Java. The plan is to tweak the OpenJDK project by removing the last few encumbered bits, so that the rest can be GPL'd.

What's this likely to mean?

Earlier this year, at the Mobile World Congress conference, there were more than 20 new mobile phones based on Linux announced, most of them using the LiMo platform. Google's Android solution is also stoking the fire, and promises to bring much open source technology to mobile handsets. Now, ABI Research has a report out predicting that as soon as 2010, 20 percent of mid- and high-end mobile devices will run a Linux operating system.

eWeek has a good interview with Ubuntu guru and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, who claims Microsoft is fracturing the open source community.....

Asus' Eee PC is the most popular laptop featuring an open source OS. The company will share its development experience at the Taiwan Open Source Summit.....

Microsoft and Novell are expanding their open source initiatives into China.....

The head of Sun Microsystems' database division says MySQL will remain an open source product.....

The $100 laptop project, otherwise known as OLPC, has faced a large number of setbacks since it was initially unveiled several years ago. The most recent such problem just occurred, when Walter Bender announced his resignation.

Did he leave because the project might abandon open source software? And what does this mean?