OStatic

Jim Zemlin at the Linux Foundation has a good reaction piece up today to the news of TomTom's settlement with Microsoft in their patent fight. We covered TomTom's countersuit against Microsoft, and the fundamental issues here. Dana Blankenhorn's take on the settlement was that it seems pretty clear the company [TomTom] has surrendered, and Paula Rooney at ZDNet characterizing the settlement as David losing to Goliath. Zemlin sees the result of this dispute as evidence that Microsoft's new openness is not necessarily so open, but there is a silver lining.

Do you use the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications? If so, OpenOffice.org Ninja has a good post up showing cross-platform benchmark tests for OpenOffice and popular forks of it on Ubuntu and on Windows XP. The tests include basic OpenOffice, StarOffice, Go-oo (a Novell- and Microsoft-backed fork that we covered here), and Portable OpenOffice. The results include some surprises.

Most people are aware that Mozilla's Firefox browser has over 20 percent market share at this point, with the latest data from NetApps showing it at 21.77 percent share. However, not everyone is aware of how dominant the browser has become in certain parts of the world, especially Europe, and it's surprising how skewed browser market share citations get across the many sites that report data. Here are a few different slices on Firefox's market share from various sources, including one showing it as the top browser in Europe. You can pick which one to believe.

Ross Turk, directory of community at SourceForge, has a notable column up today at InfoWorld, where he considers whether the economic downturn really is good for open source. We've reported on the topic a number of times, and concluded that for the most part, the gloomy times are boosting open source adoption. Survey respondents recently overwhelmingly agreed with that, as seen here. Turk points out that in the difficult economic period seen in 2000 to 2002, open source adoption in enterprises took off, but he points out that this time things may be different. Is he right?

Two new market research reports are predicting strong smartphone sales growth going forward, and some researchers are predicting that open source-based smartphones will soon start to trump Apple's iPhone. In-Stat is predicting that the number of mobile application users will quadruple in five years, and that sales of open source-based smartphones will double iPhone sales over the same time period. In-Stat's latest report on the trend, foresees applications moving briskly from mobile application stores such as Apple's and the Android Marketplace.?

In February, I wrote about GizmoForYou, an interesting site that has been described as Santa's workshop for gadgets. Registered members create wish lists for hardware inventions, and then skilled people execute the best ideas. After thinking about the model that the site uses, I began to think that a similar model might work well for open source software development. The idea is actually not new. For example, Mozilla has routinely called for users to submit ideas for Firefox extensions, and then encouraged developers to execute the ideas. Along the same lines, in this post I've come up with three ideas for open source applications that aren't available to me now (at least I don't think they are) that I would very much like to have. I also think there could be business prospects for them.

There's a lot of hubbub gathering about the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone, which runs WebOS, a Linux-based operating system. JKOnTheRun and Laptop Magazine ?(noted for its exhaustive coverage of netbooks) think it's entirely likely that we'll see WebOS arrive on netbooks. Cupcake, a strain of Google's Android OS (also Linux-based) has already been demonstrated successfully on netbooks--another example of a smartphone OS heading in more than one direction. Could Palm have much more far-reaching plans for WebOS than just smartphones? Check out how its touch-friendly, good looking interface might work well on netbooks.?

Earlier this month, in a post called Behind Red Hat's Consistency: A Surprising Concentration on Investing, I discussed a very interesting post from Savio Rodrigues called Is Red Hat a Software Firm or Financial Institution? In that post, Rodrigues noted that big proprietary software companies including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle derive less than 10 percent of their net income from Other Income that they report, which refers to income generated outside their core software businesses, typically from interest-bearing investments. By contrast, Rodrigues noted that over the past two years Red Had got a whopping 48 percent of its net income from Other Income investment sources. How did this affect the financial performance that Red Hat reported this week??