OStatic

Over at ChannelWeb, Kevin McLaughlin gathered some industry insights on the significance of Linux netbooks. In some ways, the subject seems as though it's reached critical mass and there's not much more to say, but McLaughlin's article highlights a few points that aren't often mentioned and are easily glossed over.

Earlier this year I wrote about the Chumby internet appliance/open source alarm clock. Though Chumbys have been available in the US for a little over a year now, Chumby Industries hasn't been able to officially sell these products internationally.

Chumby Industries intended all along to open sales outside the US, but electronics standards (and approval procedures) vary from country to country, and it's been time consuming. Some international users turned to friends in the States or third party shippers, but now, at least in a few countries, this is no longer necessary. Chumby is available at select retailers in Japan, and a Japanese language Chumby portal was launched last month.

When Google's Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Michael Arrington that Chrome would drop the beta designation less than two days ago, the implication was that it would happen pretty quickly. When you consider the length of some beta stages (and drawn out, fanfare driven gold releases), Chrome's 1.0 release yesterday was fast and relatively quiet.

InformationWeek shares a little of my aforementioned concern that taking an application out of the testing stage prematurely can have some serious consequences, and it does offer some insight into Google's thought processes.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta.

Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

Every sector of the tech industry, be it hardware or software oriented, offering open or closed source solutions, is feeling the economic pinch. Open-Xchange continues to weather the storm with its software as a service (SaaS) open source Exchange server alternative, announcing today it has added four new collaboration partners.

There is no magic formula for success in any business or economy, but Open-Xchange saw its SaaS product, the Open-Xchange Hosting Edition, hit the eight million users mark this year. Though many of Open-Xchange's partners are web hosts and ISPs, there is a real appeal to the SaaS model for businesses with few IT resources who are interested in adopting a groupware solution that's open and easily managed.

On Monday, the Mozilla team announced the general availability of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 for testing. Aside from increased localization support, a new Private Browsing mode, new tab switching and preview behaviors, and support for a number of new web technologies (such as the W3C Geolocation API and offline applications), the new beta release uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine by default, and has made tweaks to the Gecko engine to speed content rendering.

Though the majority of companies have policies pertaining to responding to speculation, sometimes it just gets to a point they have to. For instance, say a rumor makes the rounds (with at least some supporting evidence) that Google has something up its sleeve that might possibly have to do with an operating system. Google can keep mum for a while, but it obviously has to be formally addressed, sooner or later.

It's unclear whether Google originally intended on announcing its Native Code Project last night, or if it hoped it could squeak out some more prep time before anyone noticed something was afoot. Either way, Google has unveiled Native Client, a technology that Google says will give web developers the full power of the client's CPU while maintaining browser safety, complete portability, and safety. And yes, it is open source.

It's not breaking news that software piracy is a colossal problem, especially in China. ComputerWorld reports on how the piracy issue is prompting Nanchang, the capital of China's Jiangxi province, to require internet cafe operators to replace pirated Windows versions with Red Flag Linux. And there's the rub: they must replace pirated software with Red Flag Linux for 5,000 yuan ($725). The price includes two years of support, and the license lasts a lifetime. It is unclear whether this license is per seat, or per business location, or whether system and security updates fall into the support area. There is some confusion on whether purchasing a legal Windows server license is an option. There is no confusion, it seems, on this front -- Red Flag Linux is the Linux cafe owners must use.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols surmises this has got to be the worst way to market Linux. I'd hazard a guess it's not marketing going on in Nanchang, but his worries are spot on.

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

The Moonlight beta installs easily, and works quite well (though some sites respond better than others, this seems to hold true with Silverlight in a native Windows environment as well). The few hiccups I encountered during installation had more to do with network congestion and user error than the application itself.