OStatic

Today, Adobe announced two new Adobe Flash Platform open source initiatives aimed at developers, media companies and publishers. The two new technologies being open sourced are designed to help content publishers and developers build Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and Microsoft is focusing on the same goal with its Silverlight technology. Silverlight is competitive with Flash, although Flash is much more entrenched. (For example, Adobe claims that more than 80 percent of video hosted online is Flash-based.)

The two technologies being released as open source are: 1) Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), previously code-named Strobe, which allows developers to build customized media players based on the Adobe Flash Platform; and 2) Text Layout Framework (TLF), which developers can use to bring customized typography capabilities to web applications.

Firefox 3.5, Release Candidate 1 is available now. It's being delivered as an automatic update, and the release notes and download are here.

Google: We want Chrome to grow the Web. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, weighs in on browser innovation.

Will Google Wave revolutionize free software collaboration? What impact might it have on free software users and developers?

A Mozilla update on open video codecs and quality. How does video encoded with Theora compare to video encoded by YouTube?

Will Ubuntu remain a minor player? It has problems in the channel.

The perfect desktop - Ubuntu Studio 9.04. This tutorial shows you how to set up Ubuntu Studio with a slew of open source applications, for a full replacement of a Windows desktop.

Moonlight assumes subordinate position for Microsoft Silverlight. How should open source feel about the release of a new Microsoft Silverlight Linux port implementation?

Open source working as advertised: ICINGA forks Nagios. ICINGA is an offshoot of the popular network monitoring application.

PHP speeds to the cloud With Zend Framework 1.8. Developers will have new ways to connect their applications to the cloud.

Red Hat answers everybody on patents. In a brief filed with the European Patent Office, the company argues that patents hinder software innovation and should be limited in Europe.

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

The Moonlight beta installs easily, and works quite well (though some sites respond better than others, this seems to hold true with Silverlight in a native Windows environment as well). The few hiccups I encountered during installation had more to do with network congestion and user error than the application itself.

The Moonlight team has announced that the first beta release of Moonlight 1.0 is nearly ready for testing. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight product.

The project hopes to get new contributors to come aboard as it finalizes the 1.0 release and pushes forward to Moonlight 2.0. Developer Chris Toshok points to some of the upcoming development tasks, and says that because the 2.0 release will be larger and features numerous self-contained subsystems, developers have more opportunity to make a solid impact on the project.

Novell's Mono, which aims to create an open source, cross-platform set of tools compatible with Microsoft's .Net programming framework, has made the first, though incomplete public release , of Moonlight, an open source version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in.....

The third and last beta of OpenSUSE 11.0 has been announced, and it reportedly fixes over 700 bugs.....

Interesting analysis: A Tale of Four Kernels.....

Strong passwords are no panacea as SSH brute-force attacks rise.....