OStatic

In August, Google?s Chrome web browser jumped up to 7.5 percent market share, following 7.1 percent share in July, according to data from Net Applications.? That compares to static market share performances for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Meanwhile, the arrival of Google?s much talked about Chrome OS is imminent, and the company?s overall Chrome strategy is becoming clearer.

If you're looking for an easy way to distribute video and podcasting from your Web site, check out MediaCore, a free open source video CMS and podcast platform. It's got a batch of easy-to-use features that make adding media to your site a snap. MediaCore support seven different media formats -- yes, even Ogg Theora -- and packages content for viewing on both the desktop and mobile devices.

Working with MediaCore is super easy. Store your video files wherever it's convenient -- YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, or even your own server. Install the MediaCore software on your server (requires MySQL5 and Python 2.5), then use it to manage, organize, access and distribute your media files from a single control panel.

Beethoven has been dead 183 years but thanks to DRM restrictions you can't legally share his copyright-free music from a CD you purchase at the local music store. An ambitious project by the team at Musopen wants to build an online library of free music that's already in the public domain so listeners can share and enjoy the music any way they choose.

Once they raise the necessary funds to pay an orchestra, they'll record symphonies from Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius and share them with organizations like Wikipedia and archive.org. Musopen even plans to integrate the music files into netbooks via the One Laptop Per Child program.

The war drums are starting to beat around Novell. Now that Oracle has subsumed Sun Microsystems, only Novell and Red Hat remain as large, U.S.-based public companies focused primarily on open source software, and Novell continues to stand on shaky ground. This week, the company underperformed its guidance for the fiscal third quarter of 2010, with earnings and revenues down. As Novell struggles, some foresee a VMware acquisition, and Red Hat may end up the big beneficiary.

If you've ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it's easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that's been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it's freely available to the public to help groups look at -- and solve -- problems objectively.

Have you jumped on the virtualization train yet? If you haven?t, you?re missing out on the incredible convenience of having more than one operating system at your disposal when you?re using a single computer. The free offerings and the fee-based ones are now so automated and easy to use that there is no reason not to explore virtualization. If you?re interested in quick and easy ways to start running multiple operating systems at the same time?and tons of applications for them?here are some good resources.

Just the other day, we were considering what impact on enterprises the dust-up between Google and Oracle may have. In case, you?ve been trapped under a rock for the past couple of weeks, Oracle has filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that it inappropriately modified aspects of the Java code. Now, Google?considered by many to be extremely friendly to open source, especially among large tech companies?has pledged to pull out of the big Java One conference, which tends to have news full of relevance for enterprises and smaller businesses alike. Meanwhile, some observers are claiming that Google may indeed be in the wrong in the case.? But isn?t Oracle pushing a questionable agenda?

Consumers have an insatiable demand for bandwidth-hungry applications, and there are a multitude of challenges in trying to appease them. Researching behaviors through its?application enablement program, Alcatel-Lucent has developed a series of four recommendations for network providers?on how best to meet consumer demands.

Does the true future of Linux on computing devices lie outside of desktop computers? It?s no secret that on the desktop Linux has held steady at only about one percent market share for many years, and that has caused many pundits to proclaim that it will never be a truly meaningful player on the desktop?especially on business desktops. Now, more and more stories are appearing about inroads for Linux on computing devices other than standard desktop and laptop computers. For example, some are saying that Ubuntu 10.10 will find a big home on tablet devices.