OStatic

If you're interested in OpenMoko's Neo FreeRunner phone, but don't want to buy a development unit straight from them, there's another choice. Canadian company Koolu has signed on to distribute the phone in the Americas, UK, and EU, with plans to enhance and support the software as well.

This morning we got the news of the official launch of the CherryPal computer: a tiny little box consuming only 2 watts of power, booting in 20 seconds, and yet offering the oomph of a desktop computer (albeit an older desktop computer, as it requires a VGA monitor). This is achieved, apparently, by offloading most of the work to the cloud using Amazon's servers. While the prospect of a truly green computer is intruiging, from the open source point of view this effort does not seem to be fully-baked yet.

It may seem as if the Firefox 3 release cycle went on forever, especially if you hopped on board with the earliest betas. Many of us are still catching our breath after the version 3 release, waiting for add-ons to be updated and tweaking our preferences. But don't rest too long: Firefox 3.1 is right around the corner.

ActiveState (vendors of support and tools for dynamic languages including Perl, Python, and Tcl) just put out a free white paper aimed at the management level of businesses with questions about open source. Titled 10 Myths About Running Open Source Software in Your Business, it makes a reasonable primer for the executive who hasn't looked at open source before.

Red Hat has spent the last couple of years dealing with a lawsuit from Firestar (later DataTern) concerning alleged patent infringement in their JBoss product. The details of the patent are not especially important at this point - what's pertinent is that Red Hat apparently paid the problem to go away, while preserving in the settlement (according to their own FAQ) broad freedom for the open source community. Now that they've released the actual settlement details, we can see how well they stack up.

As it continues its sometimes-rocky march to an actual release, Google's Android mobile phone platform is now fighting a sort of internal revolt from upset developers. The problem stems from the unsteady release rate of the Android SDK, a necessary tool for anyone who wants to build applications for Android phones.

Facebook has stepped up its contribution to the open source community with the release of the Cassandra project on Google Code. The location is mildly ironic: Cassandra is roughly an open source alternative to Google's internal BigTable storage system. (BigTable itself isn't open source, though you can gain access to it via the AppEngine DataStore API). Cassandra isn't for everyone, but if you're dealing with scalability issues arising from database concurrency bottlenecks, it's something that you should know about.

As has been discussed on our sister blog Web Worker Daily, laptop theft is a big problem these days, especially for business travelers. There are commercial applications, such as Absolute Software's Computrace, that try to offer a way to track down stolen laptops. Now a team of academic researchers has released Adeona, a free, open-source package that offers similar protection.

The open-source Django web application framework is seeing an uptick in activity as it moves on towards a planned 1.0 release in a couple of months. The latest news: the first-ever DjangoCon has been scheduled for September 6-7 this year. This comes shortly after the anouncement of the Django Foundation. Taken together, this trifecta of moves indicates that Django is ready to be taken seriously by web developers and enterprises alike.