OStatic

Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, APIs, and iPhone version open source.....Matt Mullenweg from WordPress took the stage at the Web 2.0 conference to discuss new features, blogging trends, and more.....At an awards ceremony held this week, Xilinx announced the winners of its inaugural Open Source Hardware Innovation Contest.....Are open source billionaires upon us?.....

Open sourcers are increasingly producing web-based and software-as-a-service applications. This calls for developers to use top-notch content management systems, and deploy strong web development skills. To improve your odds of doing both well, see my post on OpenSourceCMS and W3Schools on WebWorkerDaily. OpenSourceCMS gives you an admin log-in for many top PHP- and MySQL-based CMS systems--from Drupal to Joomla. You can build content and see how it will look, free. Likewise, W3Schools is free, and lets you input tags and instructions, publishing results on-site, as you work with HTML, JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, Flash, and more. More at WebWorkerDaily.

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco today, Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker gave an address on opening the mobile web, which Webware did a nice job of analyzing. Many people have been wondering if Mozilla will deliver a version of the Firefox browser to work with the many Linux-based phones currently in the works, including phones based on Google's Android platform. While Baker didn't concretely confirm those details, she did discuss an upcoming mobile browser from Mozilla, to arrive later this year, code-named Fennec. (A Fennec is a small fox--get it?)

While many users of Mozilla's Firefox open source browser and Thunderbird open source e-mail engine are hip to useful Firefox extensions and efficiency tips, there are a lot of really useful add-ons for Thunderbird too. These can help you search through your e-mail more effectively, allow you to browse new messages within other applications, integrate how you use Firefox and Thunderbird together, and much more.

In this post, I'll round up a series of useful Thunderbird add-ons that I use. These can save you much time and hassle.

Star Wreck Studios, based in Finland, has built an open source platform that gives anybody the chance to make a film at no cost.....The new 8.04 version of the Ubuntu Linux distibution is out. Code-named Hardy Heron, it's available with long-term support.....Bill Gates is drawing some criticism for some allegedly incorrect comments about open source licensing.....What does Microsoft's new Live Mesh mean for open source?.....Looking for free, open source disk encryption software? TrueCrypt is for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.....

Just in advance of its annual JavaOne conference, Sun has leaked the news that it is finally planning a really-truly, no-fingers-crossed, open source version of Java. The plan is to tweak the OpenJDK project by removing the last few encumbered bits, so that the rest can be GPL'd.

What's this likely to mean?

By Raj Bala

Trends in data storage and server computing are changing rapidly, and there are some unexpected shakeups to come, with open source implications. Hardware continues to get cheaper. Bandwidth isn?t quite free yet, but it?s hardly expensive. High-quality open source software now abounds in enterprise data centers, but grid computing solutions remain half-baked and hardly commoditized.

These trends are all behind why I think Yahoo! and EMC are set for a future technology collision, given their respective philosophies--and open source is too.

Pity the poor One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Though the project has sold about half a million of the cute little green boxes with a custom Linux-backed user interface, they're widely viewed as a failure. Key people behind OLPC have recently left, as well, as Reuven noted. There are various reasons for all of this: coming out of the gate at double the planned price and completely missing their own optimistic shipment projections (18 months ago they were talking about shipping 10 million in their first year of production).

But could open-source fundamentalism be the root of the problem?

The big tech conference this week is Web 2.0, going on now in San Francisco. There is a lot of meaningful news coming out of the conference, much of it directly impacting open source and some of it peripherally impacting it. Bungee Labs is looking to open source to expand its hosting options, Microsoft's Live Mesh announcement is getting lots of attention, Forrester Research is predicting big things for Web 2.0 technologies, and more.

We've rounded up the news here, and we'll keep it coming from the conference this week.