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Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

This week brings some interesting debates on open source licenses, their limits and shortcomings, and their strengths. For example, this post explores a number of misconceptions that people have about the General Public License (GPL), which is the license behind about two in three open source software projects, as shown by Black Duck Software here. The case discussed in the post concerns a Goldman Sachs Group programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, who was arrested--by the FBI, no less--and charged with stealing computer code designed to automate Goldman Sachs' massive trading business. Aleynikov's defense was that he was only trying to download open source software governed by the GPL.

Meanwhile, as Savio Rodrigues notes, on August 31st, a smackdown debate on open source licenses will take place in Ottawa, Canada. Luminaries from the open source world will each defend various types of open source licenses, and everyone is invited to submit questions for the smackdown. You can submit your questions here, and they'll be answered during the virtual event, which you can sign up for here.

Missing: Dell Ubuntu desktop PCs. The VAR Guy explores whether Dell has stopped selling Ubuntu desktop computers.

Open source Hive: Large-scale, distributed data processing made easy. Hive is a data analysis and query front end for Hadoop that makes Hadoop data files look like SQL tables.

Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after violating GPL. Did it act simply to head off any potentially embarrassing legal disputes over violations?

SpringSource and MindTouch seek to redefine the application server. Spurred by economic pressures on IT departments, new breeds of app servers are taking shape.

The tech jobs that the cloud will eliminate. IT pros face new competition for their jobs from cloud services. Which jobs go, and which become more valuable?

Hadoop and MapReduce are cheap and scalable for clustered queries, but they're slower than relational databases. Yale researchers have an improvement.

The Ubuntu Linux app store: fact or fiction? The emerging app store, which offers Ubuntu Linux and Debian applications, wasn?t built by Canonical.

Linux slips into Microsoft's warm, deadly embrace. How Microsoft will use the GPL to mount a serious backdoor assault on the core of the Linux platform.

Is Microsoft's GPL2 support really a big deal? It's recently released code is only for Linux Virtual Machines on Windows, not physical Linux servers and Linux desktops.

Red Hat is wrong to insist Microsoft disavow litigation. Did IBM, HP, Oracle, or even Red Hat ever declare that they will never, ever sue open source developers over patent infringements?

Palm's Linux secret makes the Pre. Palm Pre is no thriller as a smartphone, but the SDK reveals the most open mobile platform on the market.

Open source Lucene threatens Microsoft, Google enterprise search. Interest in Lucene and Solr is skyrocketing, as measured by job postings.

Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline. Why is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?

Firefox 3.5's first vulnerability self-inflicted. The bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser.

Embedded Linux achieves one-second boot time. MontaVista Software announced and showed a dashboard application going from cold boot to operational in one second flat.

Boxee will blow you away. In many ways, the Boxee media center platform is much better than the original XBMC 9.04 RC.

There will be three updates to Android by the end of the year. They're all named after desserts.

Chrome OS proves Google can hype, but can it win? It used to be that only Microsoft could pre-announce a product to mass hysteria, then under-deliver for the first few iterations.

Google and open source finally kill Clippy. Microsoft is selling Office 2010 as an action flick whose first scene is at the graveside of Clippy, the paperclip help icon.

Five ways to help secure Apache on Linux. Apache is one of the most popular web servers available, and it's easier to secure than you may think.

6 reasons to license software under the GPL. Programmers are plagiarists.

24 open source apps for Asus netbooks. Good tools for Windows and Linux systems.

Apache better than GPL for open source business? What's the optimal license for commercial open source projects?

Linux fast-boot tech targets Windows users. Xandros' Presto utility can power up Windows notebooks and netbooks in seconds.

ReactOS improves its open source Windows clone. The operating system's server version has a very low memory footprint.

Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is available. It features excellent hardware compatibility and the KDE 4.2 desktop environment.

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.