OStatic

Earlier this week, the Qt Labs at Nokia announced a new project, QtMobility. QtMobility's primary goal is to offer a new set of Qt API development tools for mobile device applications.

While this will certainly make life easier for developers working with the Qt framework on specific Nokia devices, one of the best (and intentional) fringe benefits is that the new API tools are cross-platform. A single application, then, can be built and maintained for any supported Qt platform -- regardless of the mobile device model or manufacturer.

How do you know when a proposed software contract principle is really broken? When the Linux Foundation and Microsoft have their respective legal departments sit down and pen a joint letter asking it be reconsidered. ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley has written a nice, legalese-free summation of the story.

In short, the American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed some guiding principles for judges, lawyers and other legal professionals working with software-related cases to aid in settling software licensing issues. Given how quickly everything about software delivery and production changes, this in and of itself is a decent enough idea. The problem is one particular principle, a policy calling for a non-disclaimable implied warranty of no material hidden defects. Both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft say this is a disadvantage all around -- discriminating and subtlely changing between various licensing, business, and distribution models.

As some OStatic readers have likely already heard, Microsoft is taking TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices, to court for patent infringement. This is especially disturbing to those in the open source world for at least two reasons -- Microsoft's previous claims that Linux violates over two hundred patents it currently holds, and three of the claims against TomTom deal with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel in its products.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick presents some good analysis of the story, including links to the patents in question and those with particularly tenuous claims (in terms of infringement and patentability, in a few instances). While this is worrisome to those who use Linux, and certainly causing TomTom executives to lose sleep, I can't help but wonder, really, what this positioning actually means. Why is this coming up now? If hundreds of Microsoft patents are being violated, why go after a company infringing on eight (with three relating directly to Linux)? And why TomTom?

According to a poll conducted by software security company Palamida, most businesses expect their IT budget to drop in the coming months but less than half plan to use open source software to fill in the gaps. At first glance, that seems like some pretty lousy news and also appears to fly in the face of what we've heard before. Before we panic, let's take a closer look at what these survey results mean.

Open-source fans will be delighted to read a new survey published by O'Reilly Media, and announced at their annual Open Source Conference (OSCon), taking place this week in Portland, Oregon. Their report, called Open Source in the Enterprise, details the ways in which open source is being adopted by large organizations. The report indicates that overall usage of open source is growing, pointing to download statistics from Sourceforge along with usage trends inside of companies.

Under a new partnership unveiled today, Kaltura, maker of embeddable collaborative video webware, will bring video to the Wikimedia family of sites. The beta program, which is being dubbed an open, collaborative video experiment, will allow users to add and remix rich media via an embeddable player on wiki pages.

It's just a name change, but it should go a long way toward eliminating confusion from those who thought a video player called Democracy had anything to do with government. Instead, it was only meant to be a player of the people, for the peopleﾅ well, nevermind. It's gonna be called Miro from here on in, and soon there will be new icon, logo, etc., all at this address. Though Jackson, on the ground in Austin, tells us that they were still handing out 'Democracy' t-shirts...

Itﾒs been a year since the first official release of the Democracy player and podcast client, and the Democracy team is celebrating this birthday with the release of version 0.95. So whatﾒs new, whatﾒs coming up, and when will we see Democracy version 1.0? I checked in with Democracy co-creator Nicholas Reville to find out the scoop.

With all the hype surrounding BitTorrent, it's easy to forget the other mainstream P2P network, Gnutella. While LimeWire still rules that roost, Phex should make a strong showing with their first major software update in a year and a half, version 3.0. The open-source Gnutella client now runs on top of Java 1.5, and is available for download on SourceForge.