Monday November 30, 2009 5:48 PM AEST

The G1 is being touted as a direct competitor to the iPhone, and while I'm not sure it's quite there yet, it's only a matter of time before Android becomes a major player in the mobile market.

With rumours flying about HP launching its own flavour of consumer Linux, Leigh Dyer wonders whether Xandros, Linpus, SUSE and Ubuntu are quite enough for notebook users.

Firefox isn't going anywhere. There have been suggestions that Chrome is an attack on Firefox, but while I'm looking forward to some friendly competition, I haven't seen anything that suggests that Google is trying to replace or undermine Firefox.

Can you imagine coming in to the office one morning to discover that you couldn't turn on or restart any of your PCs? It sounds ridiculous, but this is exactly the situation that a number of VMware customers found themselves in recently.

The Drizzle project is taking the massive MySQL Linux community back to the land of lean, mean database servers. They've trimmed the code to less than half, removing some 600,000 lines of code.

Behind the iPhone hype, Apple's App Store introduces a frightening attack on software freedom, argues Leigh Dyer.

Leigh Dyer argues the days of a "killer app" for Linux are done and dusted. In fact, why make a Linux-only app at all?

Software patents are an important matter in the open-source world. Leigh Dyer looks at a patent case between Trend Micro and Barracude Networks that has brought out the best in the open-source community.

Leigh Dyer explains why the Penny Arcade Greenhouse project could be the most interesting gaming platform to hit the Web since Steam.

Leigh Dyer explains why the low-cost laptop interface is shaking up the OS world, and predicts why it could appear on millions of Windows systems.