OStatic

I'm surprised that more people in the Linux community aren't talking about Lenovo's smartbook, which it announced yesterday. Powered by a Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon processor and sold by AT&T, the new smartbook is Linux-based. Lenovo has had an up and down relationship with supporting Linux, and smartbooks may represent a good way for the company to get back on track with an open source platform.

The ApacheCon conference, which marked the 10th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundatoin, wrapped up a few days ago, and there were lots of highlights, including recognition from California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Oakland, California mayor Ron Dellums. In conjunction with the big event, we ran a series of guest posts from key players at the foundation, found here, here, and here. For our final guest post in the ApacheCon series, Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense (a leading open source integrator in Europe, and agile computing consultancy) weighs in on open development. Here it is, below the fold.

We've written about the Boxee media center application a number of times here on OStatic. One of the main differentiators between Boxee's open source media center platform and other similar applications is that Boxee is chock-full of social and sharing features. You can discuss shows and video clips and music with friends online--as you consume them. Boxee is also gaining more and more community-built plug-ins. Today, at the NewTeeVee Live event in San Francisco, Boxee CEO CEO Avner Ronen made a significant product introduction, and quite a few surprising predictions.

Are you increasingly using public Wi-Fi hotspots? If you are, you're in good company, as many more people use public Wi-Fi for work and play. Airports, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, conference centers and many more types of locations are Wi-Fi enabled. Many hotspot hotspot users, though, don't take the right steps to secure their sessions. In this post, you'll find six tips and applications--including both open source and freeware offerings--that you can use to lock down your sessions.

This week, much of the talk in the smartphone arena surrounds the new Android-based Droid phone, which is the result of a partnership between Verizon, Motorola and Google. Lost in the buzz over the phone--for many people at least--is that the Droid, like all Android phones, is Linux-based. Early reports show that there were approximately 100,000 Droids sold on its opening weekend, which is nothing to shake a stick at. Meanwhile, there will be approximately 20 Android phones by the end of this year, and the operating system is spreading out beyond phones as well. So just how Linux-based is Android, and is its Linux heritage a good thing?

Is open source finally making sense to Microsoft? Jeremy LaCroix sees a number of reasons to believe so. He notes that within only six months, the company has contributed 20,000 lines of code to the Linux community, given away countless copies of Windows 7, launched its CodePlex foundation, and announced that it is opening up the .PST data format behind Microsoft Outlook. I think it will be a long time before Microsoft fully wakes up to the benefits of open source, but some divisions hear the call, and more will over time.

Dana Blankenhorn on ZDNet asks an interesting question today: Where Should Mozilla Go From Here? It's hard to believe that the company's Firefox browser turns only five years old today. Stephen Shankland also weighs in on where Mozilla and Firefox should head next. I'm in favor of Mozilla becoming a more independent company, so that it can push its own initiatives in flexible ways, and I also think it has a huge opportunity in the mobile browsing space.

Remember the Milk is beloved by many people as an application for tracking to-do items and setting reminders. It's been available for use on Android mobile phones for some time, but as JKOnTheRun notes, the application has just had a significant upgrade and supports the new Droid phone. You can run Remember the Milk as a widget on your mobile phone screen, and it works well the high-res screen on the Droid. Check out more here.