OStatic

OpenID is the biggest government boost yet for open source. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a pilot program focused on it.

Red Hat challenges Ubuntu with KVM support. After placing its bets for years on Xen, the company has moved toward official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.

Oracle makes promises to Sun customers, but mum on MySQL. The company has much to say to Sun customers in a front-page ad it placed in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

he Linux kernel version 2.6.31 has been released. Desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support are among the new additions. Check out more from Linus Torvalds.

Kings of open source monitoring. OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring.

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.

SpringSource takes on Java goliaths. The company is proving that commercial open source can peacefully coexist with community involvement.

Microhoo lessons for open source. Yahoo?s open source projects are now held by a company that is cash poor.

Acer: Android netbook on track for Q3. The company has wavered on whether it will deliver one, but it apparently is on track, and may dual-boot with Windows.

The Gap moves from Windows to Red Hat Linux. The company needed to revamp its entire end-to-end business technology platform.

Dell: New Ubuntu desktop PC launching soon. There?s a high probability that it will debut the week of August 2nd.

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.

Foxmarks syncs bookmarks in Safari, Internet Explorer. The Foxmarks browser synchronization platform now works with proprietary browsers. It's always been a hit with mobile users.

Chrome getting faster JavaScript. Chrome developers have swapped a built-in third-party software package in favor of their own as part of a browser speedup.

Google just added 1.5 million books to your phone. Google has 1.5 million public domain titles scanned and digitized in a small-screen format.

Marten Mickos, Sun's SVP of databases, to leave in a reorg. This follows the resignation of MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius, and a big quarter for MySQL.

Does Microsoft subvert the virtualization space to harm Red Hat? BoycottNovell looks into allegedly suspicious partnerships and revenue sharing.

Facebook joins OpenID. Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit.

Most people who attend an open source conference typically walk away with t-shirts, stickers and other accessories branded with the logo of their favorite distro or open source project. If you don't go to those events, you can still buy cool stuff to show your support or to give as gifts this holiday season.

Here are some Web sites to check out:

Mono 2.0 lets .Net apps run on Linux.....

Red Hat CEO: The secret to open-source success is iteration.....

Getting paid to abandon an open source project?.....

October promises to be a hot month for Drupal, Mono, OpenOffice, Ubuntu.....

Open source can still win in a down economy.....

Red Hat acquires Qumranet, an open source virtualization company.....

Dell has an Ubuntu based netbook in the works.....

Ubuntu Linux now tops 8 million users.....

A new model: Open source software after it's acquired.....

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker on Firefox and Chrome.....