OStatic

If you find yourself increasingly working with video online, you're not alone. It's gotten much easier to add video functionality to applications, blogs, and much more. The open source community has created many excellent applications and utilities for working with video and animation. Over on WebWorkerDaily, I have a post up titled 6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Online Video. It covers top-notch, free applications you can look into, including Blender, Xvid, and more. Not all of them are open source, but most of them are. Check it out.

OStatic's sister, the GigaOm Network, has a special event coming up on June 25th, focused on cloud computing and the infrastructure behind it: Structure 08. Developed by award-winning tech writer Om Malik, the conference will help businesses plan future computing infrastructure needs. Structure 08 features top speakers, including Amazon VP and CTO Werner Vogels, Level 3 Communications president James Crowe, and Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos. OStatic staff will be on hand, there will be workshops on topics including Google App Engine, and the speakers will also include Larry Roberts, one of the fathers of the Internet. You can register for the event online. Hope to see you there!

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.....

Internet telephony startup Ribbit announced today that one of its long-standing proof of concept projects is now available: an integration with Salesforce.com's on-demand customer relationship management applications. Ribbit-handled voice messages can now be integrated with Salesforce in various ways, including having them converted to text, and much more. While there is proof of concept behind this integration for Ribbit and its commercial efforts, there is also proof of concept here for open source developers who have their eyes on the growing synergies between online telephony and open source.

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.....

As we posted last week, the new 8.04 version of the Ubuntu Linux distibution is out. Code-named Hardy Heron, it has new features, whole new applications, long-term support and more. This week marks the kickoff of Ubuntu Open Week--a series of IRC tutorial sessions that span a range of different topics for contributors and users. Look for updates here this week from the event. In the meantime, with the Open Source Census already showing Ubuntu as the top Linux distribution in its early results, open sourcers are serving up tutorials, reviews and discussions. Tuxmachines.org has a good roundup of examples, including screenshot tours. Here's more on what you can uncover.

Many users of open source software point to the fact that their applications and platforms are more secure than proprietary alternatives simply because they aren't such obvious targets for malware distribution. As just one example, the Standish Group recently completed a survey in which 70 percent of respondents said Red Hat Linux is less vulnerable to security threats than Windows. Still, it's good to protect yourself with top-notch security applications, and LinuxPlanet has an excellent list of 75 good choices--mostly for Linux users. Here, I'll round up 10 of my favorite choices from their list for multipe platforms, and discuss what these applications can do for you.

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.