OStatic

No matter what you're pleasure, chances are there is an online community serving it. The open source community has many such places ? Linux.com, for example ? that cater to specific elements of the community. Red Hat believes there is room for a larger community for the larger community, however, and have seen to the task themselves with Monday's launch of opensource.com.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption ? software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups.

Among the many conferences and conventions held in the Open Source world, a select few stand out from the pack. Among these is the annual linux.conf.au, which brings hundreds of Linux and Open Source advocates together each year for a week of learning, networking, and more than a little fun.

The conference is expanding its audience this year by adding a bit of extra life to the repertoire: For the first time, even those who can't make it to the conference door can join the festivities, as event organizers are streaming every single session ? live.

When it comes to playing music, there is no shortage of software options, both open and closed. The race to gain users is a race to add features, and if KDE is your thing, then Amarok may be running your way.

Once upon a time, getting the commercial sphere to embrace Open Source software was a task of Homeric proportion. Today, however, is an entirely different story: Android has taken the mobile phone market by storm, Linux powers a vast array of consumer gadgetry, and Firefox has claimed the top slot among browser versions.

FOSS adoption hasn't stopped there, however, and certainly didn't this week, as electronics-giant Philips announced it will begin shipping the popular Open Source audio player Songbird with its GoGear line of devices.

Delays are inevitable, no matter what the undertaking ? the starts just can't line up every time. Such is the case at Mozilla this week, with word coming that the much-anticipated next version of the popular Firefox browser won't be in the hands of users when the ball drops on Friday.

Very little is done quietly in a giant multi-national corporation. Exceptionally high-profile firms like Google undergo even more scrutiny, making it somewhat unusual to discover they've been developing numerous projects ? in the open, and Open Source-licensed ? that are all but unknown.

As odd as it may be, that is exactly the case at Google. A post yesterday from a Polish student/software developer lists several dozen such projects, few of which could be described as household names, even in the geekiest of homes.

Oracle's lingering takeover of Sun Microsystems stands to do a lot for Sun, but at the moment, the lifeboat is just out of reach. As a result of its continuing losses, Sun is dramatically slimming down ? several thousand of the company's employees won't be returning after the New Year's break.

Cutting employees, of course, means cutting the things they work on, and that could spell trouble for some of Sun's less profitable ventures.

In the beginning, there was Netscape and its Navigator ? perhaps not exactly the beginning, but close enough. Then came Microsoft and Internet Explorer, launching the first browser war, and eventually, the death of Netscape and a massive anti-trust trial for Microsoft. IE has retained the market dominance it gained by Netscape's downfall to the present day.

There are challenges to the market leader, however ? serious challengers, particularly Mozilla's Firefox, which has steadily gained against IE over the past five years. Like the mythical son who avenges his father, Firefox ? a descendant of the Netscape codebase ? appears to have finally won at least a symbolic victory, as Firefox 3.5 has overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the world's most popular browser.

One of the difficulties open source software faces is in implementing support ? where it is even possible to do so ? for the wide variety of codecs, formats, and other proprietary technologies that users have come to rely on. One such technology is Microsoft's Silverlight framework, which until early this year, was a no-go for Linux users.

That changed in January, when the first version of the Moonlight project ? a collaboration between the Novell-sponsored Mono project and Microsoft, begun in 2007 ? was released, providing Linux users with Open Source Silverlight support.