OStatic

10 top Linux applications. Banshee (music management), Tomboy (note-taking), and F-Spot (online photos) make this list of top apps, and you'll find 10 more good offbeat Linux apps here.

Bruce Perens: Combining GPL and proprietary software. Thoughts from the creator of the Open Source Definition.

Fedora as a basis for Russia's national OS? Red Hat has spoken with senior government officials.

Monty Widenius talks about why he left Sun Microsystems. The MySQL development organization was not functioning well under it?s capacity.

Mozilla doesn't need an EU bail-out. It has the market share to prove it.

Fennec rising. Here's video of Mozilla's mobile browser handling gestures.

The talk Nicholas Negroponte gave at the TED Conference this weekend ignited discussion on several fronts. Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports that Negroponte credits the OLPC for the rise of the netbook market, and CNET has additional information about OLPC's plans to open source the XO laptop's hardware schematics.

Would netbooks exist now if the OLPC hadn't announced its plans for a $100 laptop a few years back? Probably, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that the interest shown by the general public in the $100 laptop concept drove commercial manufacturers to develop and produce powerful-yet-inexpensive laptops faster, and in greater numbers, to a larger target market than they would have initially considered.

The other area Negroponte discussed -- opening the XO hardware -- doesn't initially, perhaps, seem as entertaining to debate as the netbook claim. The implications of open sourcing the XO hardware design are well worth consideration.