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Open source foundations aren't a panacea - even the ones you respect hugely.

The New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse are planning a move to a single cash equities trading platform, understood to be based on Red Hat Linux, in a crucial step towards saving €79 million (£64 million) in annual IT costs and delivering robust, fast messaging.

Now, I'm a big fan of Thunderbird, but I do wonder where Mozilla is going with it. Hiving off messaging hasn't worked, so the organisation needs to come up with a new strategy in this sector.

The rules for Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace appear to mean that even Microsoft's own MS-RL open source license is banned. And perhaps Nokia should worry too.

The move has been billed as one of the LSE's most significant technological developments since the increasing prevalence of electronic trading led to the closure of the traditional exchange floor in 1986. LSE chief executive Xavier Rolet has insisted that the exchange, once a monopoly, will deliver record speed and stable trading in order to fight back against the fast erosion of its dominant marketshare by specialist electronic rivals.

The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times.

While the "free for web use" claims for H.264 by MPEG-LA sound great and have deceived many commentators, they are nothing new and contain no good news for open source software.

Researchers at Russian security company Kaspersky Lab say they've discovered the first malicious software program to target Google's Android mobile operating system. The application masquerades as a media player, according to a Kaspersky blog post. But if it is installed, the rogue application begins secretly sending SMSes (Short Message Service) to a premium rate number presumably belonging to the hackers who created it.

A Norwegian startup is assuming responsibility for maintaining an open source web authentication technology originally developed by Sun Microsystems, and seemingly neglected by Oracle, which purchased Sun in January.

Canonical has released a virtual appliance for running instances of IBM DB2 database software, the company announced on Wednesday.

So the NHS has decided not to renew a large Microsoft licensing deal. Basically it had agreed a while ago to spend £500 million on Microsoft software in return for a £300 million discount. What a bargain!

Left with few options, the OpenSolaris Governing Board sends a final message to Oracle. You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community observers, we discussed how to respond to the 100% radio silence the OGB has experienced from the new owners of the OpenSolaris copyright and infrastructure. I believe we reached a balanced and well-considered conclusion and remain hopeful of a good outcome.

Frustrated by what they consider poor treatment and lack of interest from Oracle, members of the OpenSolaris Governing Board are essentially delivering an ultimatum to the vendor, asking that it appoint a liaison to the group by no later than Aug. 16, or else the board will be disbanded.

The growing success of open source software has naturally spurred on others to apply its lessons elsewhere. Open content is perhaps the most famous translation, notably through the widely-used Creative Commons licences. But one of the most challenging domains to come up with something equivalent to the Open Source Definition (OSD) is hardware – not surprisingly, perhaps, since hardware is analogue, not digital, and hence very different in nature.

Google on Monday revealed a new software tool that lets just about anyone make apps for mobile phones that use its Android software. The beta version of the website for App Inventor for Android went live from Google Labs with a video showing how easy it is to make apps, including a number of ideas for apps people can make themselves.

Online music streaming provider Spotify has announced a native application for Linux operating systems.

Nokia, with the Mobile Runtime for Java Applications (JRT), is enabling development of Java applications for Symbian 3 devices, Nokia officials said Thursday. The company recently contributed JRT to the Symbian Foundation. JRT is available as part of the latest Symbian 3 Product Development Kit, also detailed this week.

As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.

Cisco Systems today unveiled the Cius, a 7 inch touchscreen tablet computer that runs the Android OS, and is sure to be compared to the Apple iPad.

A guest post from Mårten Mickos in response to Simon Phipps's statement of opposition to so-called "open core" models. Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition". He is the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL.