open source

You'd think the world's best-selling smartphone of 2010 would have priority in upgrading to the latest and greatest Android system. You'd be wrong.

Some techies become part of open source communities and develop professional quality software for free. Then, when the software is production ready, they give it away. This is the nature of open source systems. Participating in these projects is not only good for the world; it can also be good for you.

Faced with a bill for $200,000 for statistics textbooks for their 3,100 high school sophomores, teachers at Blaine High School northwest of Minneapolis decided to write their own digital textbook. Cost? About $25,000. Savings? About $175,000.

Is Facebook the new data center poster child?

Ready for yet another social network? Diaspora hopes to battle Google+ for your attention -- and your privacy.

Enterprise open-source software and services market leader Red Hat on Wednesday reported a 42 percent increase in fiscal first-quarter profits.

Oracle has discovered it can't profit much from commercializing OpenOffice, so it will generously return to the promises it made to keep OpenOffice open source.

Google is holding back Android v. 3 to tune it for smartphones, not establish control; elsewhere, Asus posted the Honeycomb source code on its tablet product page.

The closer Google gets to establishing Android as the OS to beat in smartphones, the more it seems to want to become Apple.

Shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) skyrocketed almost 11 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday following the release of the open-source software vendor's fiscal fourth quarter earnings report. (Also see: Red Hat Defends Kernel Code Obfuscation)

PHP user group president says Microsoft's effort to woo PHP developers qualifies as a success story.

Microsoft has prohibited developers from using GPLv3-licensed open source software in any application distributed on the Windows Phone Marketplace.