Gregory Ray, lead organizer of LivingArcana.com announced today that he has hired the Brazilian programmer, Gutemberg Ribeiro, of “Conceptus” an open source game engine, to port his engine over to Apple’s iPhone platform. The port of the game engine will remain open source and will be available under LGPL license to allow true 3D game development on the iPhone.

Funambol today announced it has released an open source native app for iPhone contact synchronization. The Funambol plug-in for iPhone synchronizes the iPhone's address book with contacts from popular sources such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, GNOME Evolution and SyncML servers such as the Funambol server.

In a purely technical sense, news that Apple will offer an iPhone software development kit and allow third-party applications is not an open source story.

As recently reported on Slashdot, Apple, in its infinite wisdom, has added a checksum to the iPod database apparently to restrict non-iTunes products (like Amarok via libgpod) from having the ability to add music. To me this sounds pretty familiar. This is the same thing they did to iTunes 4.5 to make it harder for other apps to read off their DAAP shares, they changed it again in iTunes 7; open source apps are still unable to read iTunes 7 DAAP shares.

"I have the urge to commit my 24" Core 2 Duo iMac to a single Linux operating system, thus giving up the goodness of my beloved Mac OS X. I am not a stranger to Linux, but I am a stranger to running Mac apps on Linux."

gtkpod is a platform independent GUI for Apple's iPod using GTK2. It allows you to import your existing iTunes database, to add songs, podcasts, video and cover art and to edit ID3 tags. gtkpod also features international charset support for ID3 tags, detects when adding already existing songs, and more.

Apple Inc. acquired ownership the CUPS source code and hired the creator of CUPS (Michael R Sweet).

The Neuros people are looking to grab the attention of AppleTV Hackers:

"I am writing to introduce you to Neuros, and to solicit your help in building the next generation open set-top box, the Neuros OSD and other future products."

An interesting debate has started in The VAR Guy’s home. His old Windows XP PC is running out of gas. He was leaning toward a Mac Mini as a replacement. But now, Dell just complicated things.

That's the question that occurs to me as I read this piece in Roughly Drafted. It's about how Apple is kicking Microsoft's butt at the high end of the desktop market, and how Microsoft seems to be bumbling its way out of desktop hegemony anyway. Linux is mentioned only twice in this long piece, but the harbingery of the references are significant. Here's the enclosing quote:

Linus Torvalds has picked up one of Apple's new Intel-based Mac minis to play with, but the Linux creator still prefers Apple's old PowerPC architecture for his primary desktop machine.

"I'm actually still running a G5, but I also have a Mac mini," Torvalds revealed today in an e-mail to ZDNet Australia.

gtkpod is a platform independent GUI for Apple's iPod using GTK2. It allows you to import your existing iTunes database, to add songs, podcasts, video and cover art and to edit ID3 tags. gtkpod also features international charset support for ID3 tags, detects when adding already existing songs, and more.

A friend of mine phoned to ask if I thought he should install Ubuntu Linux on his Macs - a 1.33 GHz G4 iBook currently running OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and a 1.25 GHz Power Mac G4 tower with OS X 10.3 "Panther" installed.

Jon Ellch -- aka Johnny Cache -- was one of the presenters of the now infamous "faux disclosure" at Black Hat and DEFCON last month. Ellch and co-presenter Dave Maynor have gone silent since then, fueling speculation that the entire presentation may have been a hoax. Ellch finally broke the silence in an email to the Daily Dave security mailing list over the weekend, and one thing is clear: he is chafing under the cone of silence which has been placed over the two of them.

Apple may plan to open source its powerful WebObjects application next year. Citing 'insiders', a report on ThinkSecret claims that version 5.4 of the application will see much of the solutions code released to the open source community.

WebObjects is a Java-based application-server and builder for web publishing and internal application building. It's often used for ecommerce applications, and can even produce pure Java applications that can be run on non-Mac platforms.