OStatic

Novell's third-quarter loss widens, but Linux booms by 30 percent.....

Google Code reverses its open source license ban. Mozilla's and Eclipse's Public Licenses get the nod.....

Google announces Android Market for phone apps....

Four Twitter clients for Linux.....

What open sourcers can learn from the French....

Novell as Microsoft's client state.....

Battling expensive textbooks with open source texts.....

Would Linux help Adobe pummel Microsoft?.....

Django on Jython: It's here.....

9 Linux myths debunked.....

Check out Linus Torvalds' rant about security people .....

SpiderOak: Two gigs of online storage for free--and a Linux client.....

Linux 2.6.26 kernel update released.....

Justice is served: SCO ordered to pay Novell millions.....

Do Linux Penguinistas need just need to accept that the world is not ideal? .....

Novell has delivered its Q2 financial results. The company reported $30 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions of which $29 million was from Linux Platform Products--up a very healthy 31 percent year-over-year. As Matt Asay notes Novell still lags Red Hat, but enterprise Linux is a two-horse race again.....

Source Labs' Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment.....

Can Rubinius, a Ruby virtual machine written in Ruby bring back excitement to the open source scripting language?.....

Recently, I got the opportunity to pose a few questions to key people involved with open source efforts at Microsoft, including Sam Ramji (the recently promoted head of Microsoft's open source and Linux efforts), Ori Amiga (Microsoft Group Product Manager, Live Developer Platform), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). They offered up some thought-provoking input on what open source needs, Novell, China, Live Mesh, and other topics. I thank them for taking the time, and please read on for their comments.

Novell's Mono, which aims to create an open source, cross-platform set of tools compatible with Microsoft's .Net programming framework, has made the first, though incomplete public release , of Moonlight, an open source version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in.....

The third and last beta of OpenSUSE 11.0 has been announced, and it reportedly fixes over 700 bugs.....

Interesting analysis: A Tale of Four Kernels.....

Strong passwords are no panacea as SSH brute-force attacks rise.....

ZDNet U.K. is out with some interesting analysis of the LiMo Foundation's announcement that Verizon Wireless, Mozilla and several other organizations are joining up with it. According to the ZDNet U.K. report, there may be some moves afoot by two of the very well-known Linux distribution companies that currently operate in the enterprise space to join LiMo and combine mobile open source applications on Linux phones with enterprise open source deployments.

Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.

eWeek has a good interview with Ubuntu guru and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth, who claims Microsoft is fracturing the open source community.....

Asus' Eee PC is the most popular laptop featuring an open source OS. The company will share its development experience at the Taiwan Open Source Summit.....

Microsoft and Novell are expanding their open source initiatives into China.....

The head of Sun Microsystems' database division says MySQL will remain an open source product.....

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--won't deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Because it doesn't need to.