OStatic

People often think of open source as being purely a Linux and BSD thing. Perhaps they're aware of open source on OS X as well, but in general Windows is seen as hostile to open source. And at the heart of the hostility surely must be Microsoft's proprietary .NET framework, right? But no: the Mono Project provides a cross-platform, open source implementation of .NET. Version 2.0 was released this week, and it has matured into a serious development framework.

Who's the first company you think of when the words open source come up in conversation? Red Hat? Canonical? MySQL? Well, if Google co-founder Larry Page is to be taken seriously, apparently it ought to be Google.

Hypervisors - bare-metal virtualization solutions that don't depend on an underlying operating system - used to be the high-priced spread of the virtualization world. You can still pay a pretty penny for hypervisor solutions from some vendors. But an announcement from Sun yesterday increases the pressure on purely-commercial solutions: Sun's own xVM Server is now open source.

Mark your calendars: this year's Software Freedom Day is September 20 (the third Saturday in September). If you're looking for an occasion to help out with the spread of free and open source software, that's a great one.

As predicted on the project's road map months ago, Django 1.0 is out. Though this Python-backed web application framework has been around for quite a while, declaring it to be 1.0 is an important milestone - and a big accomplishment for a dedicated community of developers.

There's been a great foofooraw in the press the last few days over the license terms for Google's new Chrome browser. Various folks were concerned that the EULA for Chrome would give Google ownership of their web postings; Google has admitted that was a mistake, and they fixed the offending clause. But of course, from the open source side of things, our interest in licenses is a bit different.

Right now I know as much about Google's new Chrome browser as everyone else - which is to say, I've read the comic book and the relevant blog postings. Our own Sam Dean has a good roundup of the facts as they are known so far, and when the code actually ships, we'll bring you coverage of how it works. But let's assume for the moment that Google delivers everything they promise: what effect will this have on the wider market?

We've previously covered some of the (minor) controversy surrounding the choice of licenses for projects hosted at the Google Code site. In a nutshell, the Google open source folks are concerned about the proliferation of free and open source licenses, and one way in which they choose to make a stand is by limiting the licenses that projects on their site can use. As they point out, there are plenty of other hosting sites you can use - but being Google, their opinion does have some weight.

We've been keeping an eye on Google's Android phone project as it progresses towards release this fall. Yesterday another key piece of the support services behind Android was announced, and this one looks like a win from the open source point of view: anyone will be able to offer Android software via a free Android Market.

Open source software use by governments has a rocky history. Some governments have opted firmly for open source (and some of those have later reconsidered); others do everything that they can to avoid it. Now a group of free software advocates in Canada is challenging a lack of open source adoption by head-on attack: a lawsuit aimed at the procurement practices in Quebec.