OStatic

Recently, we covered market research that found that almost half of open source developers are focused on the cloud. As web applications make more sense for everybody, and as the software-as-a-service model and its pay-as-you-go advantages become clearer, the trend is understandable. Today, I took note of this post on the Zoho blog, which has an interesting list of a few of the web-based applications--many of them commercial apps--that are based on Google Gears. Gears, of course, is Google's open source project, based on an open API, for enabling more powerful online and offline applications by adding useful features to browsers. It's still very young, released in 2007, but very influential on the web.

Google is a company well-known for taking risks with various kinds of software projects, and the upcoming Chrome OS will be one of its most ambitious projects yet. The open source operating system, which Canonical and the Ubuntu team have contributed to, includes some bold gambles from Google. These include automatic wipes of the operating system with subsequent reinstallation whenever malware is detected, no hard disks on netbooks housing Chrome OS and more. GigaOm has the four big risks Google is taking with the new OS.

As GigaOm reports, Chrome OS is a natural evolution of the work that?s been done on the Chrome browser, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management, and Chrome OS engineering director Matthew Papakipos said when they unveiled it at Google?s Mountain View campus today. The operating system is designed to imbue web applications with the ?full functionality of desktop applications,? they added. It also features a lock-down security model, where it will download a new image of the operating system and install it if malware is detected. Cached data will subsequently be retrievable in the cloud. Source code for the OS is avaialable now. For more details, see the GigaOm story.

Rumors have been swirling for days now about possible delivery of Google's much discussed Chrome OS this week. GigaOm pinged a few people at Google to get confirmation on the rumor, and while they didn't get back a specific answer on whether the download will arrive this week, there was an invitation to a press event at Google's Mountain View campus on Thursday morning, billed by the company as an update on our progress with Google Chrome OS. It sounds like everyone will get to try it very soon. Check out GigaOm for more details.

So rumor has it that Google's Chrome OS, which had been slated to arrive some time next year, is about to arrive as a beta release. As I pointed out this morning, netbooks based on it may help preserve open source influence on a hot hardware category, but is Chrome OS likely to be a smash hit?

The announcement last week of a Linux-based smartbook from Lenovo was just one of several signs I'm seeing that Linux will maintain a foothold in emerging portable computing categories, including netbooks and smartbooks. Many people predicted that, with the arrival of Windows 7, which is squarely aimed at netbooks, Linux would fade on low-cost portable computing platforms. Here are several reasons why that is probably not going to happen.

This week, much of the talk in the smartphone arena surrounds the new Android-based Droid phone, which is the result of a partnership between Verizon, Motorola and Google. Lost in the buzz over the phone--for many people at least--is that the Droid, like all Android phones, is Linux-based. Early reports show that there were approximately 100,000 Droids sold on its opening weekend, which is nothing to shake a stick at. Meanwhile, there will be approximately 20 Android phones by the end of this year, and the operating system is spreading out beyond phones as well. So just how Linux-based is Android, and is its Linux heritage a good thing?

It was only back in March that questions were swirling about the fate of Android, Google's open source operating system. Now, of course, Android is flourishing, with approximately 20 new handsets to be on sale by the end of the year, and questions being raised about the fate of Windows Mobile as Android spreads out. Today, JKOnTheRun has a thank you letter to Google posted, in which James Kendrick says that Android has fired up the smartphone space. It's worth reading. Check it out here.

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.