OStatic

David Recordon, the open platforms tech lead for blogging company Six Apart, was on hand at OSCON this morning to deliver a keynote about ways to support the Open Web, a term that denotes a group of Web specifications developed within the open source community. Since many projects need help understanding the legalities behind adopting these specifications,ﾠ Recordon took the opportunity to announce the newly formed Open Web Foundation (OWF), an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Open source business intelligence company Jaspersoft announced at OSCON today that it has ramped up its community project development platform. JasperForge 2.0 boasts several new features including more personalized tools and customizable home pages, while also giving a nod to the social networking tools an increasing number of developers find useful. I caught up to Nick Halsey, VP of Marketing to find out more about the new features, why he thinks the JasperForge community has grown so fast, and what sets this platform apart from other Forges available to the open source community.

While the rest of the world is knee-deep in webinars, Skype-based teleconferences, and other Web 2.0 -ish forms of real time communication, most of the Linux community still relies on IRC, wikis, and opt-in email lists to get things done. At FUDCon last month, the Fedora community announced a new way of helping members and developers communicate with each other: Fedora Talk

The Ubuntu community hit the ground running at OSCON this week. Scarcely a couple of days into the event, there's already a new version of the distro to peruse and updates to the code hosting platform Launchpad to talk about. In the meantime, the project's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, still found time to deliver a presentation at the event and meet with a local tech group to talk about his vision for the future of Linux.

We often talk about how useful the productivity suite OpenOffice.org is for anyone who needs word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software, but doesn't want to plunk down a bunch of money to get it. While you may have heard of OpenOffice.org, there are some lesser-known forks and some handy tools that you might not know about. Let's take a look.

Red Hat has taken the unusual step today of publicly disclosing the terms of a settlement with Firestar Software over allegations of patent violation. At the time of the settlement, all Red Hat would say was that it satisfies the most stringent patent provisions in open source licenses Today, they're saying a bit more.

If you spend any length of time on the Internet, then you know how helpful a broswer's bookmarking feature can be. If, like many of us, you practically live on the Internet, you know bookmarks are essential. Firefox 3's revised bookmark system is great, but if you still need more than it offers, you've got plenty of other options.

Linux users have been in love for a long time with the Amarok music player and it's also been gaining attention lately as great alternative to Apple's iPod and iTunes vendor lock-in. In fact, Amarok is even going mainstream, appearing on must-have lists at Web sites like Lifehacker. Developers announced this week that the first alpha release of Amarok 2.0 is available with some great new features and a cool user interface.

The final release of Gentoo 2008.0 is out with plenty of updates and several new features that are worth a look. This release, It's got what plants crave, also gets my vote as having the quirkiest codename ever.