The free and open source software community has been waiting for the G1 cell phone since it was first announced in July. Source code for Google’s Android mobile platform has been available, but the G1 marks its commercial debut. It’s clearly a good device, but is it what Linux boosters and FOSS advocates have long been anticipating?

Many public administrations already use open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to let citizens look at public geographic data trough dedicated Web sites. Others use the same software to partially open the data gathering process: they let citizens directly add geographic information to the official, high-quality GIS databases by drawing or clicking on digital maps.

The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determination to monetize the add-on and keep its source code closed results in elaborations that make the basic idea less effective, and its constant pleas for donations make Interclue into nagware. As much as the usefulness of the basic utility, Interclue serves as an object lesson of the difficulties that the decision to go proprietary can take.

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut. CC is one of the default directories; it was already there, alongside big names Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Answers.com, eBay and Wikipedia. The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organization lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

Easy does it GPS applications on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Learn how to configure a development environment targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including setting up Eclipse on a target development machine for the Python language.

What’s ahead in the coming year? Open source giants’ latest releases and security- and energy-conscious networks, to start! December 26, 2008 By Sean Michael Kerner : The past year has seen strides in open …

We have just had the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, the day when Doug showed the mouse that everybody knows about in public for the first time as part of the oN-Line System (NLS). It is not so widely known how much more Doug demonstrated that day. He started out with windows, graphics, structured text editing, hypertext, video chat, and much more that became the foundation of all Graphical User Interfaces by way of Alan Kay’s Smalltalk at Xerox, and the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.

The white paper definition describes crowdsourcing as a “neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.” Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, gives a much better definition and describes crowdsourcing as “the application of Open Source principles applied to fields outside of software.” I’ve been bringing the concept up in more conversations because I’ve come to believe that it’s a very powerful, useful, and cost efficient model that entrepreneurs should know about. However, no matter who I talk to, whether it be a successful businessman or founder of a new tech company, I’ve had to repeatedly explain what it is. If it isn’t already, I predict that crowdsourcing will be one of the new, hot buzzwords in 2009. (We certainly need more, the term “Web 2.0″ is beginning to make me puke.)

Linux Mint version 6 Felicia came out on December 15th and I have been running it on my Dell Inspiron 530 Q6600 system for the past week. I ran Hardinfo on the system if you want to see the specifications on the box. It is a quad core with 6 GB of RAM, so I was a little disappointed that the 64 bit version of Linux Mint was not released the same day the 32 bit version came out. Even though they have a 64 bit version of Linux Mint 5 Elyssa available I wanted to try out the latest version. Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and uses GNOME for it’s desktop environment. For those who prefer a different desktop, community editions of Mint 6 featuring KDE, XFCE and Fluxbox should be out soon.

Journalists are often the bearers of bad news; it simply comes with the territory. And with the economy in the tank, there’s no shortage of ugly stories to cover. So I’m always pleased when there’s a legitimate bit of good news to write about. And counterintuitively enough, three of my columns this year contained good news about employment for techies, despite the downturn.