The open source industry in 2008 will be marked by more news out of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other big IT vendors, less start-up funding, more M&A activity, and an increasingly serious talent shortage.

A short article on Google Android, Deeda Pi Phone, and OpenMoko. Three Linux Phones to Watch in 2008.

A Massachusetts company has sued the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation for patent infringement, saying that the project has stolen it’s own designs for a multilingual keyboard on the OLPC XO Laptop; which was recently released to the public in a buy 2 get on scheme, where the user purchases a laptop for themselves and pays for a laptop for a user in a third world country.
Lagos Analysis Corp, also known as Lancor, filed the lawsuit on Thursday, in the Federal High Court in Nigeria, where the company owns the patent for the four shift-key keyboard, said said Adé Oyegbola, Lancor’s CEO.

Groklaw member LEXLAW suggested that now would be a good time to take a second look at Novell's Trial Brief [PDF]. It was filed in Utah back in the middle of September, on the same day that SCO filed for bankruptcy in Delaware, and so we never did a text version or paid much attention. But now that we are Utah bound, here it is, the text version, the work of the entire Groklaw Group. You know, like the SCO Group and the 363 Group? Except there are more of us than there are of them, now that I think of it.

xTuple announced that the current shipping release of its xTuple Applications – the OpenMFG Enterprise Resource Planning Suite and the PostBooks free and open source edition – have been certified for use on Apple’s new Mac OS X Leopard operating system.

At 36 years old, William Hurley has been involved in IT for more than half his life, starting after a car accident that left him badly injured. While recovering, he began hacking X-objects for MacroMind and later Macromedia Director in the open-source multimedia community, then went to work at Apple Inc. and IBM, where he was a master inventor and senior manager of targeted Internet applications.

Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in IBM Lotus Notes for Linux, which could be exploited by malicious users to bypass security restrictions and potentially compromise a vulnerable system. These issues are caused due to insecure permissions being set on extracted binaries and the installdata file when executing the installer program, which could be exploited by a local attacker to modify arbitrary files such that subsequent installs performed by the root user could deploy malicious content or code to end user systems.

Red Hat announced that EsSalud, a state-owned insurance and service provider in Peru offering medical and economic benefits that cover eight million regularly insured parties and successors, has experienced success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With the solution's virtualization capabilities, the company has stabilized its organization-wide systems through a swift, transparent and cost-effective implementation project.

"The open source code for EeePC is available here. To download the source code of all open source software packages that are included in the product, follow the steps listed below."

It must be maddening to believe you command developer loyalties and lead legions worldwide, then watch developers flock to the Linux kernel. Maddening, that is, if you're Microsoft. Why does Microsoft say its patents cover Linux, while at the same time reaching out to other open source code projects? It's the Linux kernel development process.

Google has announced a contest open to high school students during the Open Source Developers' Conference in Brisbane, Australia. The Google Highly Open Participation Contest was created to help introduce high school students to open source software development.

"While I was cleaning up my office I ran into the March 1986 issue of UNIX/WORLD, a long-since deceased magazine. I had saved this particular magazine because I am the author of the article featured on the cover: The Unix System on the IBM PC."

Witness No. 3 continued on the stand Tuesday in the Hans Reiser murder trial, and she quickly became the subject of several insults under cross examination by the defendant's attorney.

In what seems like a promotional press release for Microsoft, Turbolinux talks about something which is called “Interop Vendor Alliance”. Remember WSPP and MCPP? The release from Turbolinux itself states:

Aras Corporation announced that Marc Lind, vice president of marketing, will present “Open Source Transformation: Managing the Transition to an Open Source Business Model” at the upcoming joint session of the New England chapter of the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) and the Boston Product Management Association (BPMA).