The recent mail from Novell titled "Upcoming maintenance requirement to access patches and service packs for select Novell products" only adds confusion for Linux customers. As it turns out, nothing much has changed.

The San Diego based VIA Telecom, owned by the Taiwaneese VIA Concern, is to become a member of the Open Handset Alliance, the consortium around the mobile operating system Android.

The browser and Songbird music player developed out of the Mozilla project have come together in a cooperative framework with Philips in the 2010 models of their GoGear MP3 player series.

Lenovo presented a hybrid netbook with Intel CULV processor and a tablet usable display with integrated ARM CPU at the CES in Las Vegas. The operating system is Windows 7 for the netbook and Linux for the tablet.

Google has presented its Android mobile phone to the public. What's special about the Nexus One is the 3.5" touchscreen with an OLED display resolving at 800 x 480 pixels and the newest Android 2.1 (Eclair).

Those who buy a computer in most countries with Windows and do not accept the terms of licensing have to pay for the unused license(s). The procedure is complicated and inconsistent. In Italy, a group forming a collective complaint seeks to bring order to this chaos.

If the newest statistics from Net Applications are to be believed, Google's Chrome browser has surpassed in market share Apple's KHTML engine-based Safari browser in December 2009 by a few tenths of a percentage point.

A tiny script from U.S. network specialist Scott Iekel-Johnson extracts software licenses from source code. The oss-license-extract tool is now available in version 1.2.