OStatic

If you've hung on to your BlackBerry smartphone in the hopes that you'll one day see an open source version of it's code, you're in for a long wait.

Speaking at the BlackBerry Developer Conference hosted by Research In Motion (RIM), RIM Senior Software Developer Cassidy Gentle said, I would expect some of our Eclipse or Mobile Tools for Java could be made available on an open source basis, but as for our APIs or other softwareﾗthat's a pretty big leap.

BMW announced this week at the Convergence 2008 automotive electronics conference that it is in search of an open source partner in developing a car computing platform.

Some speculate that an agreement between BMW and Mercedes-Benz that determines some hardware purchasing decisions is a major influence in BMW's preference for an open source system. Another factor BMW credits is how fast technology changes, and how open platforms are able to keep pace.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the community feel and involvement that draws many to open source projects.

One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.

Mozilla Labs recently offered a sneak peak and download of Geode. Geode is one of the first applications to use the new W3C geolocation specification API. It is currently available as a plug-in for Firefox 3 (and seems to only support Windows and Mac systems at this time). Mozilla Labs indicates it will likely be a new feature integrated in an upcoming browser release.

Geode uses web-based tracking, which tends to be faster than the traditional GPS geolocation methods. This would enable Firefox to sense the user's location and give information, for example, on local businesses, or quick access to local news.