OStatic

By Aaron Huslage

Multitouch display technology has been at the center of many a geek's attention since the release of the iPhone almost a year ago. The ability to combine computer vision, projector display technology and the electronics to control it all had been the provenance of big companies and university research labs. Now Stefan Hechenberger and Addie Wagenknecht of New York based NOR_/D have put together an open source alternative called Cubit. This is worth taking a gander at.

Bowing to what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the changing landscape of the IT industry and others call pressure from EU anti-trust actions, Microsoft announced today the release of some of its technical crown jewels: the heretofore secret APIs Microsoft products used to talk with each other.

Microsoft is changing the way it does business and is opening up, according to a long elaborate press release the company issued this morning. I am reading through it and will try and make sense of it all.

Many online news sources continue to be completely dominated by discussion of Microsoft's hostile bid to acquire Yahoo! And no wonder: a deal of this magnitude has the potential to touch the lives of pretty much everyone living and working online. It's a rare web worker indeed who doesn't use something from one or another of those two companies in their daily lives.

While nearly all of the analysis of Microsoft's offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion has centered on the Redmond giant's intent to compete with Google for online advertising dollars, swallowing Yahoo! would also plant Microsoft squarely in the middle of the open source software arena. Yahoo! is so firmly entrenched in open source software-from the server farms that its own site runs on, to its Zimbra division delivering open source apps, to the APIs that it offers to application developers-that Microsoft, as corporate parent, would have no choice but to shed much of its long-standing antipathy toward open source.

Dell begins bundling FonalityοΎ’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market οΎ— this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

I admit, it is a little late to get to the most important story in tech - Microsoft's not so subtle patent power play - but I needed to absorb it all. What Microsoft does with those 235 patents that open source products are infringing upon, remains to be seen. There are still two issues that the story raisedοΎ…