Technology, Open Source | featured news

Hewlett Packard donates its mobile system software, WebOS, to the open source community and says it will continue to invest in the project. The tech company acquired the software when it bought the smartphone maker Palm for $1.2bn (£767m) last year. HP used the code to power its short-lived range Touchpad tablet computers before it abandoned the product line.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It'll be a tough go -- Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play.

Nokia’s new all-screen N9 phone, the product of its ill-fated collaboration with Intel on the open sourced Meego operating system, is here.

Oracle abandoned OpenOffice, but now it seems, thanks to IBM, that it may live on with another organisation.

The argument over the utility of open source has one more voter in the yes camp. This time, it's the Journal Register Company, a U.S. newspaper chain with 170 publications.

The ultimate hacker phone, the Nokia N900 is the truest expression of Linux—the OS and the philosophy—that you'll find on mobile this year. It's a great niche gadget. But the idea that free, open-source solutions will sweep the mobile world is just as doomed in the U.S. as the idea of popular, open-source desktop PCs—in this case, because mobile networks don't welcome the unexpected, and they don't welcome geeks.

Microsoft will offer a free Web-based version of Office as it looks to compete with Internet-based software from Google and increased competition from "open source" products.