OStatic

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.

SourceForge, which is behind many top web wites including Linux.com and Slashdot.org, has just announced the opening of nominations for its third annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. There's a big difference in how the awards process is structured this time around: For the first time, all open source projects -- not just those on SourceForge.net -- are eligible. The awards recognize open source projects that have the most supportive community following, and those that voters believe reflect high quality, creativity and ingenuity. In open source fashion, the community--not a panel of judges--votes for the award winners. You can find out more on the awards categories and July's awards ceremony here.

In a story, The Best Video Download Tools on our sister blog NewTeeVee, Liz Gannes has identified a very useful extension for (almost) everybody's favorite open source browser: Firefox. Liz's pick is optimized for downloading and saving video segments for the web--for those items you don't just want to stream and forget about. I've taken her extension for a spin in Firefox, and it looks very good for anyone doing a fair amount of web video viewing. It comes with a helpful set of tutorials, too.

ZDNet U.K. is out with some interesting analysis of the LiMo Foundation's announcement that Verizon Wireless, Mozilla and several other organizations are joining up with it. According to the ZDNet U.K. report, there may be some moves afoot by two of the very well-known Linux distribution companies that currently operate in the enterprise space to join LiMo and combine mobile open source applications on Linux phones with enterprise open source deployments.

A Korean software company called NomadConnection has released Chameleo, a pretty-looking open source video player with a focus on extensibility and widgets. The software, based on GStreamer and other open source projects, supports a wide variety of codecs. The sample widgets that come with Chameleo give video watchers the ability to take screen captures, blog what they?re watching, use video tags and subtitles, open new files, and browse the web. A Linux version and a Mac version are coming up in a matter of weeks. Our sister blog NewTeeVee has the details.

Linux-based mobile phones have just picked up added momentum, thanks to Verizon Wireless. Numerous Linux phones and phones based on Google's Android (Linux-based) platform were announced early this year at the Mobile World Congress, and many companies joined the LiMo Foundation--the organization behind improved mobile Linux technology. However, while U.S.-based phone makers announced plans for Linux phones, not a single large U.S. service provider joined the LiMo Foundation's cause. That's changed in a big way now, as Verizon Wireless becomes the first U.S.-based operator to join the LiMo foundation. Mozilla and others have just joined as well.

A new version 9 of Fedora, the community maintained Linux distro that's the foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is out, as is analysis.....

OpenOffice's new beta--compatibility problems with MS Office XML formats?.....

Vidoop hires dream team open source veterans.....

Does the market have irrational expectations for open source?.....