OStatic

Google has given Oregon State University's Open Source Lab $300,000, following a previous gift the company gave of $450,000. The gifts have come under the wing of the Campaign for OSU--an effort to raise funds for the university's research and other projects. Can companies like Google and Microsoft benefit themselves from this kind of gift-giving?

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

OSCON, the huge annual open source convention run by O'Reilly opens today in Portland, Oregon and continues through the end of the week. OStatic will provide updates throughout the week, and we've been pre-briefed on several interesting announcements. This year's conference includes a number of high-profile speakers, including Google's Chris DiBona and Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth. Roberto Galoppini has posted a good guide to the key events at the conference, and you can find more here and in the rest of this story.

I'm always interested in the offbeat ways that the benefits of the open source model--lots of eyeballs, community efforts--can be applied to new types of ideas. We posted about several non-software focused efforts in this area recently.ﾠ Now, as The Guardian is reporting, the band Radiohead has a new spin on this concept. Its new single House of Cards has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here--better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.

As it continues its sometimes-rocky march to an actual release, Google's Android mobile phone platform is now fighting a sort of internal revolt from upset developers. The problem stems from the unsteady release rate of the Android SDK, a necessary tool for anyone who wants to build applications for Android phones.

Google Browser Sync was a reasonably popular Firefox 2.0 add-on from Google Labs. Like Mozilla's Weave (which is still having some early teething pains), Browser Sync was designed for people using Firefox on more than one machine, keeping bookmarks, history, and saved passwords the same on those machines. But you'll notice the past tense: for whatever reason, Google decided not to update Browser Sync for Firefox 3.0, and discontinued the project last month.

While Google posted them a few days ago, I've just had a chance to sift through some of the large volumes of video-based presentations from its Google I/O and Developer Day events that the company is now offering via its blog. This is quite a large and interesting library of posts, for developers of all stripes. Just check out the presentation topics you can watch here from the Google I/O event. Here, below the fold, are some of the better offerings that Google has posted from its recent events held around the world.

The open source folks at Google seem to be on a roll lately, pushing out some of the key pieces of the company's internal infrastructure as open source projects. The latest addition on this front is the prosaically-named Protocol Buffers. Depending on your application requirements and choice of language, Protocol Buffers may provide an efficient replacement for other data interchange formats such as XML.