Android sensors are a great way to make Android developed applications smart.

Enable your Android app to tap into Android location services, pinpoint a user's location and then do something useful with it.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 4 with a streamlined UI, new features, and a boost in speed.

BitcoinJ is a Java client for Bitcoin, an Internet currency P2P architecture for processing transactions without a central bank or payment system.

According to Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Mozilla's Firefox 4 Web browser is the now the fastest browser when compared with Chrome 10 and Opera 11.

It's been seven months since the last update to gnash, but 0.8.9 has arrived.

Wine has switched to the latest Mozilla Geck Firefox 4 engine.

The battle for the PC ended like most tech battles, the technology became obsolete. So now that we're entering the age of the handheld, can open source cut it?

CouchOne and Membase release the first verion of Couchbase open source NoSQL server.

GNU wants to build a free and open source telephone system using the Internet. It would work somewhat like Skype, but distributed, decentralized and free.

Open source Kitware is going to begin working on Phase I of this project to allow for real-time investigation of big data.

Microsoft likes H.264, but they've decided that Windows users could one day be able to watch videos using the WebM format.

On June 1, Oracle says that will pull the plug on sun.com forever.

It's called libav. It's a fork of FFmpeg.

Internet2 group says they're going to roll out a new national backbone network delivering up to 8.8 terabits per second bandwidth.

For now, it appears the trojan is only affecting on particular Chinese mobile network.

Mozilla says they have fixed more 8,000 bugs in Firefox.

Java used to be included in LSB, but now the Linux Foundation has said licensing changes have made it impossible to include Java as a language.

Intel's Zou Nan hai committed 13 lines of code to the Mesa Git mainline and that commit dramatically boosted Sandy Bridge Linux performance.

The AMD Bullet Physics for AutoDesk Maya 2011 is designed to enable game developers and 3D artists to access Maya's creative workflow.

Apache Chemistry is an implementation OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services).

BitNami is offering free PHP and Ruby on Rails-based BitNami applications as CloudFormation templates.

To show how committed Canonical is to LibreOffice, the company has a dedicated employee working on it.

People interested presenting at the 2011 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference have until April 15 to apply.

The new executive director John Sullivan said he's looking forward to working closely with FSF president Richard Stallman.

Along with the Honeycomb API, Google released updates for SDK Tools and the Eclipse plugin.

After several malicious applications were published via Google's Android Market, Google has said they have plugged the security hole, pulled the apps from the market and devices, and they called the cops.

Despite Nokia's move to partner with Microsoft, KDE is not abandoning Qt.

'Mentor recognized early that only an open source verification methodology would provide users the ability to write fully portable and reusable verification components,' Mentor Graphics general manager John Lenyo said.

Mozilla's Web application store is still in its infancy, but the organization is hoping it can carve out a spot for itself in the app store arena.

It's a lo-fi gaming platform, but the games actually look good. The project creator setup a Kickstarter project to raise money. His goal was to raise $3,333, so far more than $22,000 has been pledged.

In just a few months, the number of MeeBlip aficionados keeps expanding.

In an apparent attempt to trip up Oracle, Red Hat is now obfuscating its kernel source code and patches for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Peter Tattam's Trumpet Winsock was a widely distributed application, but he didn't make much money from it. Now is your chance to give something back to the man who made connecting to the Internet with Windows 3.1 possible.

Splashtop Linux has been around for a while as an OEM-installed OS, but now it's downloadable.

The UK government says it's serious about open source.

The second named release of the VP8 Codec SDK (libvpx) is now available, focused on performance and quality.

After years of development, Nokia walks away from open source to the welcoming arms of Microsoft for Windows Phone 7.

Aspects of your web page are now inspected in the Network panel. This gives you access to even more information at a single glance.

Before the end of 2011, Kitware plans to add 15-20 new workers.

Max Ogden says he wants users to have an option to be totally private and 'off the grid.'

The donations came from 2,000 donors in a little over a week to fund creating a legal entity for The Document Foundation in Germany.

The latest stable version of X Server includes many bug fixes and one regression since RC3.

The differences between Gingerbread and Honeycomb are not grand. The name for the new Android was not announced, but rumors suggest "Ice cream."

Developers fork JSLint and create JSHint, claiming author of JSLint is too "opinionated."

Mozills Labs updates the F1 file sharing Firefox extension UI.

Oracle customers are choosing GlassFish over WebLogic and programmers are picking Jenkins over Hudson.

How and if the Veterans Affairs implements its open source medical information technology could have widespread impact on the entire health care system.

The Android Builders Summit provides an intimate forum for collaboration at the systems level and discussion of core issues and opportunities when designing Android devices.

The project is called Supercell and it will provide testing free of charge to other open source projects.

These Intel investments represent innovative companies that Intel is working with to help advance our mobile platform initiatives across the smart device segments, Intel said.

At a press conference, Intel vice president Renee James said, "Meego is more of a vibrant community project that is going to go forward."

"LiMo 4 represents a timely milestone in the advancement of a uniquely open and independent device platform that is completely free of inherent brand and business model conflicts," Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of LiMo Foundation said.

The move by MPEG LA is the first step in possibly creating a patent pool for WebM/VP8.

The Arduino IDE and driver work on Mac, Linux and Windows, and tons of object-oriented libraries are available for Arduino to make complex tasks easy.

The catalog includes more than 1,300 certified components from 161 manufacturers--making it the largest list of Linux-compatible components available.

This major update to GTK+ offers many improvements, including Cairo drawing throughout and modern input device handling.

Journalist charges Aite Group with spreading FUD by blaming open source software for Nasdaq's SQL injection hack.

By manipulating a JFileChooser object using a Timer and ActionListeners, a hacker can not only view a user's file system, but she can create folders, move and rename files, or pretty much whatever she wants via an Applet.

CouchOne is the first-ever comprehensive NoSQL solution provider by merging CouchDB with Memcached.

If approved, the "Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository" project will build on the initial contribution to deliver modular, versatile and full-featured content repository technology for Eclipse developers.

Companies said that gaining a competitive advantage is "significant reason" for choosing open source software over proprietary.

Linux vendors have until Feb. 11 to tell the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency how they can help the intelligence agency with its Linux information system.

Members of the open source project management system Redmine have forked it to create ChiliProject.

The community edition of Greenplum is free for everybody, but EMC will charge people who run the database in production and want support.

Chrome 9 offers WebGL, Chrome Instant and Chrome Web Store features.

If you use the open-source ATI Linux graphics driver, a major stable update is now available.

The new offering is geared toward new developers, students and smaller development shops. The cost is less than $200.

Simian is Google's software for managing software packages on Mac.

The biggest change in this release is a complete rewrite of the Ajax module.

To help fill demand for Linux-based smartphone and tablet developers, The Linux Foundation is offering six training courses on Android and MeeGo.

Instructure is an open source learning management system (LMS) that hopes to take on the big kahuna in LMS, Blackboard.

After years of hard work, Angël Seghezzi has released the first release candidate for his game development tool Maratis.

CodeWeavers takes advantage of the latest improvements made in Wine 1.3.9 to release "The Impersonator" CrossOver version 10.

The window manager for Linux libraries have been in beta since October 2009, but now they're ready for prime time.

According to Intel, if everyone converted to their Open FCoE software stack, the world would save $3 billion in hardware and power costs and 400 million feet of cable.

Kitware has decided to release ActiViz .NET tool under the open source BSD license.

Last month, Mozilla expanded its bug bounty program beyond Firefox.

Android 3.0 Honeycomb is designed specifically for tablets.

A new "snapshot" feature allows Android virtual devices to boot nearly instantly.

A year and a half later, Selenium 2.0 is getting ready to ship. It's the result of the merging WebDriver and the Selenium Web testing suites.

Apache and two other JCP members left the Java governing body in a snit last year. The nomination of the Bruno Souza is perhaps an attempt to repair the damage.

Perl 5.12.3 is the fourth stable release of Perl 5.12 and includes several minor bugs fixes and some tweaks to core modules.

The Apache 2 license requires credit be given for copyrighted, patented, trademarked and attributed work.

jQuery 1.5 will include a complete rewrite of the Ajax module, deferreds and subclassing.

LibreOffice 3.3 stable is now available for download and judging by the reviews, it's better than OpenOffice.org.

Using OpenStreetMap's open source data, MapQuest launches eight more country-specific mapping websites.

Mozilla is planning to offer a do-not-track feature to future versions of Firefox.

Forrester Research reports predicts that in the next decade the open source community will have walked away from Java while mission-critical large enterprises will stick with it.

Rather than referring to the HTML specification as "HTML5" or "HTML4," the WHATWG is dropping the version number. The HTML specification will now be a "living standard."

Nokia Qt is expected to ship with Ubuntu 11.10, and Ars Technica's Ryan Paul says this is a huge victory for developers.

A new team of developers has taken over the FFmpeg project and left the old developers wondering what happened.

Micro Focus announced a new product today to make it easier to write portable COBOL so that it works with Java, Microsoft Azure or .NET.

The FSF is urging website operators to stop using H.264 and to switch to the WebM video codec.

By optimizing necessary boot processes, eliminating unnecessary ones and taking a different approach to solving problems, SwiftBoot is able to boot an embedded Linux in one second.

Debian 6.0 is scheduled to be released in the first weekend of February.

XIPCloud Storage is currently in a "very short" beta, but when it goes live, it's expected to offer unlimited data storage.

Many people are angry with Google over the company's stance to embrace an open standard for the video tag in HTML5 rather than H.264, which requires users and publishers to pay a royalty to watch videos in their browser.

As long as the Expert Groups don't screw things up by introducing a bunch of changes, Oracle is confident they will reach general availability for JDK 7 on July 28, 2011.

There's a lot of buzz among developers about Node.js, but who's using it and why?

While Microsoft's WebMatrix is a sort of Web developer's app store, "the fact that Microsoft has decided to stock it with open source software goes some way to showing how far open source projects have progressed."

Previous versions of Cassandra had a 2GB upper limit on the amount of material a single row could hold. With version 0.7, that limit has been eliminated.

All of the incoming House freshmen's Web sites are running Drupal, but existing members have the option to switch.

IndexedDB allows Web applications to store large amounts of data on the client's computer for fast offline retrieval.

The Total Grid community will host projects such as smart grid applications, protocols and Reef/GreenBus functionality.

Jaspersoft says this is the first complete BI suite designed for Web applications.

Google said that only open source codecs will be supported in Chrome.

Oracle has ticked off another open source project. This time it's Hudson.

In November, Apple said they were going to deprecate the current Java for Mac. Now Java Development Kit 7 for Mac OS X is out.

Cassandra is used by Twitter, Facebook and Reddit to scale massive amounts of data.

The entire Enron email dataset was made available to the public by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Platform as a service provider, PHP Fog, wants to do for PHP what Heroku does for Ruby.

After a VLC developer complained about the App Store's terms of use being incompatible with the GPL, Apple has finally pulled the VLC media player.

Released under the MIT or LGPL, WebCron is a Web site backup tool that can back up files and MySQL databases.

Open source Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems. Today, Joomla developers are expected to release version 1.6.

AMD's open source Linux support is timed to be in Linux 2.6.38, but it rules out being included in Ubuntu 11.04.

Black Duck Software says that Diaspora social network was the clear number one open source rookie of the year for 2010.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this year Motorola announced four new Android devices including the Xoom tablet, Droid Bionic, Cliq 2 and the Atrix smartphone.

Oracle says that it's Unbreakable Linux Kernel is faster, more secure and more reliable than any other Linux distribution available.

Thanks to Google, Firefox is now the dominant browser in Europe.

The nonprofit Internet Archive has more than 150 billion Web pages archived. Congress passed a law that levels a $150,000 fine for each copyright violation.

An Android bug first reported in June 2010 causes Android to send text messages randomly to the wrong recipient. It's still not fixed.

The game Canabalt took onlyabout two weeks to build, and it has been downloaded more than 225,000 times from the App Store. And now, it's open source.

Rendering math codes in a Web browser has been a challenge. Now Project Euclid has released MathJax, a JavaScript engine that aims to solve that problem once and for all.

Both Apple and Android are gaining market share while BlackBerry continues to lose, but open source Android appears to be gaining ground on Apple's iOS.

Whether you love JavaScript or just tolerate it, everyone can agree that JavaScript has some problems.

Older hardware requires older drivers and that's what the Wary Puppy Linux distro offers.

Without a centralized server, Bitcoin developers are creating a peer-to-peer system for crypto-currency.

The New York Times' open source offerings and APIs don't get a lot of press, but there are some interesting tools available to developers, such as the Congress API.

The government of Cuba has set a strategic goal in 2011 to migrate most of its computers to open source software.

For the first time ever, the OSI has asked for an investigation into the purchase of an open source company. The organization has asked Germany's Federal Cartel Office to look into Microsoft's role in the sale of Novell to Attachmate.

Mozilla published 44,000 user accounts for addons.mozilla.org, but claims all of the accounts were inactive.

Research firm says SugarCRM is expected to bring in about $95 million in revenue in 2012 and $107.7 million in 2013.

Russia plans a national repository similar to the App Store for free and open source operating systems.

The Document Foundation folks are making progress towards their first stable release of LibreOffice. The second release candidate is available now, and the productivity suite has its own website too.

Delays force the Mozilla open source Web browser release back to first quarter of 2011.

A code audit finds no evidence of any FBI conspiracy to sneak backdoors into OpenBSD.

Open-sourcing a project doesn't have to be difficult, but before doing so, Matthew Helmke thinks you should answer these questions.

Countries that adopt open source software are those with high levels of technical training, a general population that has access to the information society and governmental policies that encourage the use of open source software.

Google's open source YouTube channel is a place to find videos related to open source software projects.

KDE joins Open Invention Network for patent protection.

With the first VirtualBox 4.0 beta coming out on December 6, Oracle continues to push the open source project forward.

Google releases all of the source code for Android 2.3 Gingerbread, giving another nod to open source.

Debian's been working on shipping a totally free Linux kernel since Debian 4.0 "Etch." Now with the upcoming Debian 6.0 "Squeeze," they think they've achieved their goal.

According to Gregory Perry, the FBI paid several OpenBSD developers to program backdoors into the IPsec stack so that the FBI could monitor site-to-site VPN communications.

MapQuest is using open source OpenStreetMaps.org data to get a leg up on Google's dominant position in the online mapping arena.

The open source data center automation company acquired MCollective in early October, this is the first MCollective release.

With the purchase of SOPERA, Talend beefs up its middleware stack.

Most Android devices use the YAFFS file system, but with Gingerbread, the ext4 is now available on vendor devices that support it.

Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker said that the notion of a Web "browser" will be radically changing in the near future.

For Apache projects outside of official Apache projects, there's now Apache Extras.

Programmers make mistakes, but too often the bugs are the result of not avoiding common pitfalls.

With all of the exciting new features coming in Android Gingerbread, a security fix in the SDK will help developers protect users from TapJacking.

Version 1.3 of qooxdoo adds some impressive new features include 'virtual' lists, a progress bar and improvements for the toolbar.

All of the major commercial Linux distributions have been certified by The Linux Foundation.

The Apache Software Foundation has joined others in stepping down from the Java Community Process Executive Committee.

Crankshaft analyzes JavaScript to determine which bits of code are heavily used and which are not. The code that is heavily used with be optimized; the code that is not will be left alone.

During testimony, one witness said that the code allegedly stolen by Sergey Aleynikov from Goldman Sachs contained a lot of open source software.

Tim Peierls was the only member of the JCP Executive Committee representing independent Java programmers, and he quit this week.

Asay was with Canonical for only 10 months, and now he's leaving to join Strobe to build HTML5 Web-based applications.

Oracle's claim that it owns the trademark for the Hudson open source project name might be bogus.

To promote awareness of the upcoming Firefox 4 open source Web browser, Firefox is streaming cute red pandas (a.k.a. firefoxes).

Google abandoned Wave in August when the company realized that people weren't that into it.

The first beta of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation's OpenOffice fork, is now available for testing.

Sun cofounder Scott McNealy said that what really hurt Sun was closing off Solaris from the open source community.

WordPress 3.0.2 fixed a pretty serious bug that allows authors to execute arbitrary SQL.

More than 800 bugs have been squashed in the latest Google Chrome 8 release. Google paid out $4,000 in security bug bounties.

All you can currently do in Katalabs HTML 5 Virtual Worlds browser is walk around, sit down, and chat, but it's a start.

Oracle continues to stumble in managing their many open source projects. This time they locked out the entire open source community from accessing the Hudson project source code.

Testing shows that Adobe Flash 10.2 is noticeably faster than 10.1 on Linux.

Rather than just looking at companies selling open source software, Alan Shimel says that a better measuring stick are all of the companies using open source software.

The latest VirtualBox from Oracle fixes several bugs and improves security.

While there's been a dip in patches per hour, the Linux kernel remains the most successful open source project yet.

Oracle's $1.3 billion court win against SAP proves that with open source software, customers are in the driver's seat.

Red Hat has added to its Cloud Foundation portfolio by purchasing Makara.

A lively debate broke out in the open source community when one developer discovered how to speed up the Linux desktop with a few lines of code that patch the kernel.

Microsoft claims some 30 million blogs on Windows Live, all of those bloggers are encouraged to migrate to WordPress.com before March 2011.

Originally a side project of Graydon Hoare, Rust is a new programming language by Mozilla.

It's too early to tell if open source social networking project Diaspora will be a Facebook killer, but Ars Technica's Ryan Paul reviews the alpha code.

The OpenVizsla project has raised nearly $40,000 to build an open source USB sniffer.

On December 17, 2010, the Symbian Foundation will pull the plug on its Web sites, and the open source mobile operating system source code will no longer be downloadable.

AMD next-generation Fusion APU chip is a low-power, dual-core processor.

The second Random Hacks of Kindness is scheduled for December 4 and 5.

The Web turns 20 next month and creator Tim Berners-Lee is worried about its future as corporations chip away at net neutrality and open standards.

With its deal with Novell set to expire, Microsoft arranged for all of the alleged Linux patents to be held by a shadow group called CPTN Holdings LLC.

The HTTPS Everywhere Firefox plugin attempts to protect Firefox users from having their accounts hijacked by sites that do not encrypt cookies.

First, Microsoft got mad and threatened to sue anyone who created open source drivers for their Kinect controller. Now they're fine with it.

Now even nongraphical product developers can leverage the power of the GPU to speed up their applications.

Mozilla has seen significant revenue growth from calender year 2008 to calender year 2009.

Java SE 6 will continue to be provided by Apple, but Java SE 7 and future versions of Java will be available from Oracle.

What features will Android application developers need to support in version 2.3, aka Gingerbread? Here are the nine most anticipated features the rumor mill expects to be included.

Java SE 7 is scheduled to ship on July 28, 2011 with a first release candidate set for May 2011.

Black Duck software, an open source software management firm, has been making lots of purchases lately. The latest is SpikeSource, a provider of software tools and services to automate application component identification and security.

The new version of the Parrot dynamic languages virtual machine has better garbage collection and it's on GitHub now.

The Kaltura Video Platform Community Edition has the same features as the commercial edition, as well as a cloud deployment option.

The Blender Foundation said they will use the prize money to set up a dedicated wiki server and upgrade the project's back-end software and bug tracking.

Silverstripe is the first open source Web application to be Microsoft certified.

A secret debugger has been discovered on AMD Athlon processors that could allow for the chips to be reverse engineered.

MapQuest may have lost some of its luster to Google Maps and Bing Maps, but the company has chosen to embrace open source and open data. Now they've added bicycle route information to their Open Direction Service API.

Oracle responds to the Apache Software Foundation's threat to leave the Java Community Process Executive Committee, asking them to reconsider. The ASF tells Oracle it's you who needs to do the reconsidering.

Security blogger proves once again that SHA1 is obsolete and should no longer be used.

First Ubuntu said they're dropping the X Window System for Wayland, and now Fedora says they will too.

If anyone violated anybody's copyrights, Google says it must have been a third-party because they have no idea what Oracle's talking about.

Ubuntu developers and companies met in Orlando, Florida to discuss the Ubuntu Natty Narwhal 11.04 release.

This version of jQuery adds the .fadeToggle() method and fixes a bunch of bugs.

Hoping to tap into the momentum for more cloud computing tools and solutions, Novell announces Baracus.

Embracing the ideals of open source software development, Samsung has made Galaxy Tab's source code available for download.

After purchasing Metaweb and its Freebase software in July, Google has renamed the project Refine and released this week version 2.0.

It took about a week for a hacker to produce the first open source Kinect driver and claim the $3,000 bounty offered by Adafruit.

In just six months, Linaro has now more than 70 developers working on improving embedded Linux with ARM.

Google to Facebook - you can have our data when we can get your data.

The newest Tiki Wiki introduces re-Captcha, batch function and an improvied WYSIWYG editor.

Google can open source Chrome, because doing so can't hurt them, and may even help them, but open sourcing Android and Google TV is a bit different for the search engine giant.

Nokia setup the Symbian Foundation two years ago when it took complete control of Symbian and made it open source.

The ARM processors aren't as fast, but they use a lot less power than x86.

It's been six years since Firefox 1.0 on Nov. 9, 2004.

Userful is offering a custom installation of open source Ubuntu Linux to schools looking to save money.

The newest stable Chrome Web browser fixes several security flaws and updates Flash.

By deciding to raise their support rates on MySQL, Oracle is perhaps opening the door for smaller support firms to service small and medium-sized businesses who rely on MySQL and commercial support.

Confusion over license text forces the Apache Software Foundation to issue a statement.

The biggest change was getting rid of Big Kernel Lock in the core.

Despite the number of bugs, this security audit of Android is good news for Google and potentially for open source software.

The patent war continues with Apple leveling a patent lawsuit against Motorola and its Android devices.

Just days after getting Apple's AppStore approval, a VLC developer asks Apple to stop distributing VLC on the AppStore because doing so violates the terms of the GPL.

What motivates open source developers most is the chance to solve a problem and the opportunity to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Matt Asay warns Microsoft against continuing the company's current strategy of threatening lawsuits to crush open source software.

Open Source for America (OSA) promotes the use of open source in the U.S. federal government. This week the group announced the winners of its inaugural open source awards program.

The open source cloud toolkit OpenNebula 2.0 was released this week.

This week, open source KDevelop 4.1 hit the Internet with Git integration, improved PHP support, a Hex editor, remote project importation, external script execution and patch exporting.

Meego version 1.1 is now available and the Nokia N900 can dual-boot Meego and Nokia's Maemo OS.

Asterisk 1.8, the next major release for this open source communication server, turns a computer into a communication server that can handle IP PBX, VoIP, conference calls, etc.

Getting started with PHP for Android and the Scripting Layer for Android is easy with this step-by-step guide, complete with a demo application.

Redis provides a powerful and speedy alternative to relational database servers for PHP developers.

By combining the power of PHP with a nice templating system such as Smarty and a powerful database such as PostgreSQL, you can cleanly isolate the viewer of your application from the data model and controller.