If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads.

When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

While some of us were skiing or eating during the Christmas holidays, Matthew Aslett was crunching the numbers on total open source investments since 2000. The answer? A whopping $1.89 billion. The numbers just keep getting bigger, too, with $475.2 million raised in 2006, up 61.6% from $294. million in 2005.

Dell's recent IdeaStorm experiment reveals increasing demand for Linux and open-source software on the desktop. Since that time, Dell has said that it is still not committed to selling laptops and desktops with Linux preinstalled for the general consumer and small business markets. At the present time, Dell offers select Dimension, Optiplex, and Precision desktop computers without operating systems.

Need an "open source" company nowadays merely be "a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company"?

Nat Torkington raised this week the very real question of whether the term "open source" is now completely meaningless, in the sense that its meaning has now been sucked out of it by companies that purport to be open source yet don't allow users to feely download, compile, and use the software in question. One example Torkington cites is SugarCRM, whose license he describes as "a questionably modified OSI-approved license.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property is making another attempt to reform patent law. I need your help to lobby them to add protection from software patent attacks for Open Source software and Open Standards.

Sun Microsystems has become a "patron" sponsor of the Free Software Foundation, the organization founded by Richard Stallman that ultimately spawned the open-source software movement.

At the Communications Ecosystem Conference today The Linux Foundation, the new organization formed last month from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, today announced availability of its Carrier Grade Linux 4.0 Specification.

JasperSoft Corporation, the market leader in open source business intelligence, and MySQL AB, developer of the world’s most popular open source database, today announced the availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool, and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.