OStatic

At yesterday's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 3G and numerous other initiatives, it became very clear that the coming battle among smartphones will be largely decided on? the basis of who gets the best applications. Applications built with the upcoming iPhone 2.0 SDK looked very mature, and there were many demonstrations showing how easy they were to create. What does this mean for Google's Linux-based Android mobile platform and the wave of Linux-based phones expected later this year?

Many people in the open source community agree that more economic fairness in the open source ecosystem could help users and developers alike. Increasingly, big tech companies are waking up to the concept, as seen in the hefty cash prizes that Google awarded top developers in its Android Developer Challenge. Now, a new venture capital-driven effort is taking shape that will ask for community participation in identifying startup companies to invest in. Dubbed VenCorps, Webware has an interesting analysis of it. I'm betting that some of the capital will go to open source developers.

With a series of Linux-based phones based on the LiMO platform coming this year, and phones based on Google's Linux-based Android platform, is there risk of market fragmentation? We've looked at the platform prospects before. Now, Stacey Higginbotham, on our sister blog GigaOm, has an analysis of what we can expect to see. She also wonders why ABI Research keeps adjusting its predictions for Linux smartphone market share. Check it out.

Every once in a while, you run across something online that appeals to you for inexplicable reasons. That's how I feel about Goosh. Goosh looks and feels like a Unix shell, and behaves quite a bit like DOS, in fact. It's a command-line interface that is powered by Google. I wouldn't use it as my main front -end for doing Google searches, but I agree with Webware that the application has a charming retro feel.

As we wrote last week (after initial reports came out on TechCrunch), Facebook is open sourcing what it calls a significant part of its Facebook Platform. What does a significant part mean? According to the company it means most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags. Especially for many developers who want to build social applications, this looks like good news, but OStatic readers wrote in last week questioning whether Facebook is really going open source (see the comments in the link above). Is it?