OStatic

InfoWorld's annual Bossies awards recognize top free and open source software projects, and the third annual list of 40 winners is out now. This year's list of winners, unlike last year's, focuses strictly on enterprise software, application dev tools, network management software, platforms and middleware.

Mobile applications had a good showing among the award winners this year. PhoneGap, an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript, got a nod. Fast-rising open source projects were also honored, including the WebKit browser rendering engine, and Hadoop and Hive--tools for processing data collections in the terabyte and petabyte range. OpenStreetMap, an open source version of popular mapping services like Google Maps and MapQuest, was one of the more interesting Bossie winners. Here are the winners, with links to the pages for these projects that we maintain here at OStatic, where you can find out much more about them and search for alternatives.

Why is Google using Solr for search? The company has adopted the open source search server based on Apache Lucene for its All for Good site.

Australian defense force builds $1.7m Linux-based flight simulator. It runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers, and uses an open source graphics platform.

Should open source hate Apple? The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft is a straw man.

7 reasons to use Debian. From stability to documentation, it's outstanding.

Four free, slick word processors. You can use these no matter what operating system you're running.

Are you old enough to remember black and white TV, vinyl records and 8-track tapes? What about the Pet Rock? If you are old enough, you're acutely aware of how limited and almost laughable old-school technology can seem--even technologies that are not so old in relative terms. The market for smartphones and applications for them is raging, and, whenever I'm out in public I notice how tightly integrated with people's lives their smartphones are.

Open source, is, of course, going to be a huge part of the future of smartphones, and I don't doubt that application contributions from the open source community could shift their future dramatically. This week, I noticed a number of developments that made me think of some seemingly far-out but entirely doable scenarios for the smartphone future. They could make today's phones seem like stripped down novelties, and might even qualify as revolutions.

Undoubtedly, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion, Fast Company, InfoWorld and OStatic. We've had a great experience with it, and many large media companies are migrating to it and saving money. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he described the core contributors to the project as on the same scale as the Linux kernel. There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible.

Since OStatic's inception, we've collected many good resources for both getting started with Drupal, and extending its functionality if you already use it. Here is our latest update to that ongoing collection--eight great resources, including interviews with Drupal insiders.

While Novell's report yesterday that its quarterly Linux revenue soared 22 percent year-over-year was a positive note, and one that was expected, the real upshot of the company's earnings report was that every other part of its business sank. Overall, its revenues slipped to $216 million for the quarter, compared to $245 million for the comparable quarter last year. Despite the company's drum pounding about the promise and growth of its Linux business, Novell is a public company that needs revenues to come from more than one aspect of its business.?

As Matt Asay notes, Red Hat's financial performance has been much rosier during the recession, but there are also questions arising about why Red Hat's revenue growth is slowing. Both companies need more than just Linux business to grow over the long run, and there are good reasons to believe that Red Hat may be the one of the two that pulls a rabbit--or a series of them--out of its red hat.?

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.