OStatic

Why Google released Closure tools. The release of Closure Tools by Google under an open source license is about putting muscle behind Javascript.

Microsoft Linux: Why one free software advocate wants it. An ex-Microsoft employee says Windows is doomed, and FOSS will rule.

Vint Cerf plugs Android into the Interplanetary Net. He has added a software stack to the open source Android code.

Q&A: Ubuntu 9.10 security. What are the most notable security features introduced with Ubuntu 9.10, and how can you work with them?

Barnes & Noble, aided by Android, aims to disrupt the Kindle. The Nook has two capabilities that could expand the market for e-book readers beyond Amazon's.

Why one writer can never be exclusive to Linux and open source on the desktop. The file compatibility of the current productivity stack and the lack of some applications matter.

Open source does not work well for bad guys. While some researchers express fear of malware writers using open source to improve their work, it actually doesn't help them.

OpenID implementation works on mobile platforms. Swedish company Accumulate has implemented a version of the OpenID standard for mobile phones.

Atlanta Linux Fest: Top 9 Ubuntu highlights. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu.

How one Melburnian spent Software Freedom Day. He introduced an audience to Python.

OpenID is the biggest government boost yet for open source. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a pilot program focused on it.

Red Hat challenges Ubuntu with KVM support. After placing its bets for years on Xen, the company has moved toward official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.

Oracle makes promises to Sun customers, but mum on MySQL. The company has much to say to Sun customers in a front-page ad it placed in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

he Linux kernel version 2.6.31 has been released. Desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support are among the new additions. Check out more from Linus Torvalds.

Kings of open source monitoring. OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring.

Novell's Linux revenue soars 22 percent, while everything else tanks. The bad news was that overall, net revenue slumped to $216 million from $245 million for the third fiscal quarter of 2008.

Google's Summer of Code ends. 1,000 students from 69 countries contributed open source solutions in microfinance software, government data apps, and more.

Aussies coming through with a laptop per child. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has begun fulfilling a promise to give every high school student a laptop, offering Lenovo machines with Windows 7 and some surprising open source applications.

15 great Ubuntu tips For Linux power users. How to be lightning fast and clever at the command line, and more.

As Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains, Canonical has always offered commercial support for Linux, though its services largely targeted the enterprise market. Today, Canonical is announcing its plan to extend commercial support services to Ubuntu desktop users: individuals and small- and mid-sized businesses desiring a dedicated helping hand with Ubuntu installation, data migration, and network configuration.

Canonical offers three levels of support -- starter, advanced, and professional (the comparison chart breaks down coverage nicely) -- for one- or three- year periods.

Hadoop and MapReduce are cheap and scalable for clustered queries, but they're slower than relational databases. Yale researchers have an improvement.

The Ubuntu Linux app store: fact or fiction? The emerging app store, which offers Ubuntu Linux and Debian applications, wasn?t built by Canonical.

Linux slips into Microsoft's warm, deadly embrace. How Microsoft will use the GPL to mount a serious backdoor assault on the core of the Linux platform.

Is Microsoft's GPL2 support really a big deal? It's recently released code is only for Linux Virtual Machines on Windows, not physical Linux servers and Linux desktops.

Red Hat is wrong to insist Microsoft disavow litigation. Did IBM, HP, Oracle, or even Red Hat ever declare that they will never, ever sue open source developers over patent infringements?

Palm's Linux secret makes the Pre. Palm Pre is no thriller as a smartphone, but the SDK reveals the most open mobile platform on the market.

Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? What does a Linux company, which Oracle is, want to do with its newly purchased Sun operating system?

Google releases open source NX server. Amid the fanfare of the Chrome OS announcement, Google quietly released an open source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display.

HP releases $500 Linux netbook onto Aussie market. This week sees the Australian launch of the Mini 110, which HP is offering with both Ubuntu and Windows XP.

Free operating systems that aren't Linux. There are other free options such BSD, OpenSolaris, HaikuOS, ReactOS, and PureDarwin.

Chrome, Android have different jobs, Google says. Android has features unique to running mobile devices, and one doesn't replace the other, a Google mobile executive says.

While it may be a completely philosophical debate whether the universe is turtles all the way down, it's a lot less existential to imagine that the internet is clouds all the way up. In April, Canonical previewed its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (affectionately known as UEC), a system designed to simplify the creation, optimization, and management of cloud environments for private organizations. The interface and functionality of UEC is similar to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, uses in-house hardware running Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04, and is powered by Eucalyptus Systems cloud computing tools.

Today Canonical officially launched the UEC service, including generalized tech support, consultancy and deployment services. Although UEC support is a joint offering from Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical, the Canonical team will act as the primary contact point in order to simplify and streamline support transactions.