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Mozilla on Tuesday patched nine vulnerabilities, six of them critical, in Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 3.5. But rather than highlighting the security fixes in Firefox 3.6.4, the company instead emphasized the addition of crash protection, a move meant to keep the browser alive when popular plug-ins drop dead.

Talks are under way between Google and Dell to bring Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric operating system, to Dell's computer lineup, according to a Dell executive. Dell wants to be "on the forefront" of "unique innovations" like Chrome OS that will hit store shelves in the next few years, Amit Midha Dell's president for greater China and South Asia recently told Reuters.

An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google's Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster. In an entry on his personal blog that was reposted to Mozilla's uber-blog, Planet Mozilla, John Wayne Hill, an Indiana University masters student interning this summer at the open source company, spelled out changes that would give users the feeling that Firefox starts quicker.

After applications recently started disappearing from the Android Market, Google continued to have reliability issues with the online store as developers over the weekend experienced issues with erroneous download counts. On Saturday, a number of developers started complaining about incorrect download counts on Android Market. The total number of downloads for their respective applications had in some cases dropped by several thousand, developers reported.

With more companies being drawn to the possibilities offered by open source source software, Ubuntu company Canonical and open source consultacy, The Open Learning Centre have teamed up to offer a workshop on Linux within business. There's a growing interest in open source software, the new coalition government has made encouraging noises about the use of the technology and the companies are hoping to tap into that interest with the aid of some enthusiastic Linux devotees.

Desktop Linux has floundered for three main reasons: too few applications, limited desktop hardware compatibility, and too few tools (not to mention skilled people) to manage a boatload of Linux desktop systems.

“Linux is subversive”: so begins “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond's analysis of the open source way. The subversion there was mainly applied to the world of software, but how much more subversive are the ideas that lie behind open source when applied to politics.

A group of chip makers including IBM, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments unveiled Linaro, a new software engineering foundation dedicated to improving Linux distributions, including Android, MeeGo and Ubuntu, used in consumer devices.

Tuxera offers Android and Linux driver for next-generation memory flash cards that relies on Microsoft's exFAT.

It's a fantastic start, but we need the government to mandate open source examples to accompany open data.

Security researchers will demonstrate a malicious "rootkit" program they've written for Google's Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.

As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom.

Google has removed the beta label from the latest version of its Chrome browser, marking the first time a "stable release" is available for the Linux and Mac OS platforms, not just Windows.

Users who have bought Nokia's flagship smartphone, the Maemo-based N900, won't be able to upgrade the device to MeeGo, Nokia said in a blog post. The MeeGo OS, merges Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo Linux-based operating systems.

Two exhibitors at the event last weekend showed off open source 3D printers that can build objects based on your instructions, another one introduced 3D design software.