OStatic

On Thursday, the Linux Foundation announced it had appointed Ted Ts'o as Chief Technology Officer. In this position, Ts'o will lead all of the Foundation's technical initiatives, and be the technical point of contact for Linux Foundation members and its Technical Advisory Board.

What is it about the holiday season? It throws a spotlight on the best -- and worst -- aspects of human nature. It holds true in the open source world. NextStep, a hardware recycling and refurbishing organization in Eugene, Oregon, was burglarized earlier this week. Hardest hit was the organization's Ubuntu Laptop Program. NextStep provides computers, technology and job skills training to Lane County Oregon's under-served residents, and its Ubuntu Laptop Program is a major source of funding for these endeavors.

That's the bad news. The good news is that helping NextStep might be as easy as looking through that box of hardware you've got in your office.

In early October, Lisa wrote about open source mobile push and sync provider Funambol, and its decision to try supporting its services with ad revenue. Lisa felt (and OStatic commenters seemed to agree) that as long as the service was good, and the ads weren't intrusive, it wasn't a bad trade.

Today, Funambol released the results of its user survey regarding its ad funded mobile email service. The survey results echo some of the comments here -- ads that are non-intrusive, relevant, and respect user privacy are acceptable when subsidizing the cost of useful, free applications. It seems targeted ads, paired with the right services, could prove to be a solid market model.

Microsoft digs into PHP.....

Sun gets grant for AEGIS Project, to give open source the accessibility features of proprietary software.....

Linux comes up for AIR.....

Sun extends virtualization with open source xVM VirtualBox.....

IBM Lotus strategist sees Linux on netbooks making inroads Vs. Windows in 2009.....

Developers of Trillr, a microblogging project similar to Twitter, announced this week that its source code is now available to anyone who wants it. The idea for Trillr was conceived in 2007 as a peer group experiment among team members who wanted to learn more about Python and Django, and was created as an enterprise tool with enhanced features like group discussion and a user directory.

Trillr project member Stefan Aust admits the code base is kind of crappy as it stands now, but that's to be expected since it was part of a learning process. He says that, looking back, he would have done some things differently but notes, perfect source code does not create communities. Our source code can.