OpenTangent

The OpenOffice.org community has disassociated its self from Oracle by creating The Document Foundation . Oracle owns the OpenOffice.org brand so the  newly created foundation has rebranded the product as LibreOffice which will effectively replace OpenOffice.org as the standard office application bundled with most Linux distributions. The greater open source community has responded very positively with Novell , Red Hat and Canonical all expressing their intentions of including LibreOffice in future releases of their respective distributions. One down, two to go: OpenOffice.org Java MySQL

Oracle claimed that the EU didn’t get open source when they tried to prevent Oracle’s acquisition of Sun . It’s plain to see that the acquisition was purely to destroy the competition. Sun is dead and it’s software is slowly being buried with it. Well, not quite; Sun actively developed three of the worlds most important open source contributions; Java , MySQL and OpenOffice.org . Regardless of the loopholes that Oracle is trying to pursue with their current case against Google , once a copyleft license is applied, the product effectively becomes the property of the consumer. When the deal was announced, the open source community was up in arms however i believed that Oracle was simply waking up to the necessity for open source in the software industry. The world is not ready to drop the proprietary model just yet but a software company the size of Oracle must have realised that they were falling behind. I was wrong, Oracle have no clue about open source and apparently have no int

The strength of any technology is modularisation and standardisation. The ability to swap out and redesign, giving anyone the opportunity to easily innovate on the original concept. It’s the very reason PCs overshadow Macs and it’s the reason the concept of open source is not just an ideal but an absolute necessity. Innovation, modularisation and open source, these are the concepts that define the California based startup; Always Innovating . They are known for the Touch Book which combines a tablet and netbook to create a remarkably adaptive mobile device. They have just released their latest product; the Smart Book , which sets a new level of versatility in mobile devices. Check the video: This is definitely not for Apple fans , it requires a bit of tech savvy to really appreciate it's features but this really is something special. It is a little expensive but considering it's diverse "swiss army knife" feature set i'd say it's justifiable. Hats off to

Of all the champions of the Freedom of Information movement none can claim to have held the banner quite as high as The Pirate Bay . They have weathered legal storms far greater than anything Napster or even  Wikileaks have conjured up yet as i write this The Pirate Bay site is down. In an orchestrated attack , ISPs accross Europe were raided by police. A number of news sites reported that the site was up and running soon after the raids but this does not seem to be the case anymore. It seems like this was a solid effort to put them down for good but i'm sure this is not the last we'll see of The Pirate Bay. Edit: Guess who's back up ;)