OStatic

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find an updated set of more than 50 useful open source resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

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.

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.

Here at OStatic, we regularly round up educational posts and new ideas for users of open source. Collections of open source tools, some compiled by us and some compiled by others, can take you in new directions and make you more productive. Here, below the fold, are 8 useful collections of open source tools and tips to try.

This week is a big one for open source browsers, which, as we've pointed out many times, are responsible for most of the innovation going on in the browser arena. The first beta version of Firefox 3.6 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and you can get it here. Meanwhile, Google has delivered a very fast new beta version of the Chrome browser, and it features bookmark syncing so that you can keep your bookmarks streamlined across multiple computers.

Mozilla is out with version 2.0 of its SeaMonkey hybrid browser and email platform, based on Firefox and Thunderbird. There is a long list of additions to the new version, which you can peruse here. SeaMonkey didn't use the exact same core as the Firefox browser before, but now shares the the core of Firefox 3.5.4. Among other things, that means extensions should work more dependably than they did before. Here are some of the other important improvements.

Mitch Kapor--founder of Lotus and designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet--is one of the true pioneers of the software industry. People forget how mighty Lotus once was, with a market capitalization that towered over Microsoft's, and over 80 percent market share in spreadsheets. In a discussion with the Guardian U.K., Kapor pronounces Microsoft's war against open source over. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's over, but it's not the war it once was by any means.

We've written about Fennec, Mozilla's mobile browser, a number of times. It's now in its fourth public beta, and GigaOm reports today that Mozilla CEO John Lilly wants it to be just as disruptive on mobile devices as Firefox is on the desktop. ?We wanted to build a browser that did everything ? Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio, says Lilly. What that meant was we had to wait for a while for devices to get better to handle this modern browser.? Check out more at GigaOm.