OStatic

We've been keeping an eye on Google's Android phone project as it progresses towards release this fall. Yesterday another key piece of the support services behind Android was announced, and this one looks like a win from the open source point of view: anyone will be able to offer Android software via a free Android Market.

When last we looked at Google's Android mobile phone OS project, there were some rumblings of discontent in the developer community. This week, though, developers have a lot less to complain about (though, perfectionists that most of us are, we can still find a few issues). That's because Google has pushed out an 0.9 beta version of the SDK, making its vision for the first Android release much clearer.

Are we about to see more competitors pulling out of the mobile Linux race? Recently, researchers at J. Gold and Associates produced a report predicting that Google's Linux-based Android platform would merge with the new and open source mobile platform from Symbian,? pitting two huge Goliaths (Google and Nokia) against any Davids who might dare to produce Linux-based handsets. While it's pure speculation that that might ever happen, a sign of weakening confidence on the mobile Linux front has appeared: The Access Linux Platform's initial and only smartphone project was recently rubbished. Orange is bailing on its plan to deliver a Samsung smartphone running Access Linux.

Google has just released an open source cryptographic toolkit: Keyczar. The company is aiming to make inherently complex cryptography easier and safer for developers to implement. In addition to the Google Code page where you can get the toolkit, there is this information page, and a link to a discussion group. Keyczar is released under an Apache 2.0 license. What does it offer?

Webinars and webcasts on all kinds of technology topics have exploded in recent years, and the good news is lots of the best ones are free. All you need is a browser to attend them, and most of them stay archived online for long periods of time. For open sourcers, there are both ongoing webcasts on cutting-edge open source topics that you can attend on a regular basis, and previously produced ones that may be of interest. Here is a collection of both upcoming and archived ones that could be of interest to you.

Google has given Oregon State University's Open Source Lab $300,000, following a previous gift the company gave of $450,000. The gifts have come under the wing of the Campaign for OSU--an effort to raise funds for the university's research and other projects. Can companies like Google and Microsoft benefit themselves from this kind of gift-giving?

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

OSCON, the huge annual open source convention run by O'Reilly opens today in Portland, Oregon and continues through the end of the week. OStatic will provide updates throughout the week, and we've been pre-briefed on several interesting announcements. This year's conference includes a number of high-profile speakers, including Google's Chris DiBona and Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth. Roberto Galoppini has posted a good guide to the key events at the conference, and you can find more here and in the rest of this story.

I'm always interested in the offbeat ways that the benefits of the open source model--lots of eyeballs, community efforts--can be applied to new types of ideas. We posted about several non-software focused efforts in this area recently.? Now, as The Guardian is reporting, the band Radiohead has a new spin on this concept. Its new single House of Cards has a video that was created using advanced visualization techniques and various computer-rendered models. The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here--better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.