OStatic

Remember the scene in the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn't really that far-fetched and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.

Mistry is the creator of SixthSense, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and tiny projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Special fingertip sensors let users manipulate the data and use their hands to interact with it. During a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week, the PhD student announced plans to release SixthSense under an open source license in the coming months.

Open source content management software vendor eZ Systems put former IBM executive Christoph Rau at the helm today as the company's new CEO. He's replacing co-founder Aleksander Farstad, who will become chief business development officer.

Farstad says the move is the next logical step following 10 years of sustained growth in the open source industry. For the first 10 years of eZ, we grew successfully by focusing on our unique commercial open source business model, says Farstad. Our value came from our focus on how we did things better. Now, as the commercial open source business model has matured and is well established, we will focus on what we do better than any other competitor: help businesses manage and publish any type of information, created and managed by anyone and published through any digital channel.?

We've written a number of times about open source security and authentication applicaiton vendor Likewise Software, because they're a quality company with a great product line. Likewise Open supports over 125 platforms and links Linux, Unix, or Mac systems to Active Directory domains in one easy step. Likewise Enterprise allows IT departments to authenticate users, create reports for regulatory audits, and control access to applications and data.

If your IT department has been considering giving Likewise a whirl, the free download of Likewise Open is available for the taking. If you're already a Likewise Open customer, then you'll want to listen up. Tomorrow, the company is formally announcing new ways to upgrade to Likewise Enterprise but we've got the skinny right now.

Open source mobile push email and sync provider, Funambol announced today it has acquired AJAX Web 2.0 framework provider Zapatec. Currently, mobile Web app developers are forced to build native apps for several different platforms, a process that's time-consuming and costly. Funambol's acquisition of Zapatec addresses the issue by offering a way for developers to build open mobile browser apps that take advantage of a phone's native capabilities, yet supports multiple devices.

Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco tells OStatic he sees good things ahead as a result of this new partnership. Developers today need to build separate native apps for too many mobile platforms, including the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW, mobile Linux, Java ME and other proprietary mobile OSs and environments. It is too much work to support all of these platforms, which forces developers to make difficult choices about which phones to support

If you're like most computer users, your hard drive is probably stuffed to the gills with movies, pictures, music, and media files you want to hang on to. If you're trying to figure out a good way to manage them all, have a look at Moovida, an open source media player that's so snappy you might kick your current player to the curb.

Moovida is loaded with more features than one person could probably ever use. Media is searchable by artist, song, TV show, movie title, or file name. Thumbnail and slideshow images of cover art or image files display beautifully and put CoverFlow to shame.

One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is.

I'm beginning to think the folks at Zenoss never sleep. How else can the popular open source network monitoring software vendor explain all the recent announcements and news they've been making the last few days? Let's start with the contest.

The new Community ZenPack Contest captures the cloud computing craze. Zenoss in the Clouds ZenPack Contest is aimed at users who want to create modules, or ZenPacks, to allow Zenoss to monitor cloud infrastructureand service providers, or deploy cloud-based technologies.

Was it you? Someone out there was the one hundred millionth person to download the popular open source word processing suite OpenOffice.org 3.0 yesterday, just in time for a celebration at the community's annual conference in Orvieto, Italy next week.

The milestone took just over one year to achieve once OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released October 13, 2008. The project followed up with three subsequent point releases and version 3.2 is scheduled to appear in December.

If part of your workflow involves a lot of cutting and pasting, then you know how limiting the native clipboard feature is on your desktop no matter which platform you're using. If you want to add a little extra awesome to your cutting and pasting routine, then have a look at this roundup of clipboard tools that make the job go just a little easier.

Glipper - This clipboard manager for the GNOME panel. It keeps a history of copied text so you can refer back to it later. Glipper has support for Actions, Snippets, No-Paste services, and more. It's available in English, German, and Italian.

CodeWeavers, the software vendor whose product line allows users to run Microsoft applications on Linux and Mac operating systems, has announced the one-day Lame Duck Anniversary Sale. In honor of the one-year anniversary of last year's popular free giveaway, new customers and returning customers half off everything in its store, including product renewals.

Billed as a 24-hour non-giveaway, customer have until midnight CST tonight, to make a purchase at a 50% discount. Any purchases made today will also include the upcoming release of CrossOver (code-named Snow Mallard ), along with 2-for-1 support days until its release. That is, if you purchase today, and we ship Snow Mallard a month from now, we'll retroactively add two months of support to your account when Snow Mallard comes out, and you'll get it for free, the CodeWeavers team announced in an email to customers. As an additional incentive to buy today, 25 random customers will receive lifetime support contracts as well.

In typical hilarious fashion, CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White issued a press release outlining his reasons for not giving away his products for free again this year. His tongue-in-cheek explanation is that the 650,000 licenses he gave away last year nearly sent the company into a financial tailspin and left his sales director a shattered mess. My socialist phase has passed, says White. I?m back to being a greedy capitalist.