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TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Google's vice president Marissa Mayer told him in an interview that Chrome will be coming out of beta. Mayer didn't give a definite time frame, but one would assume that this would mean sooner rather than later. This announcement is a little surprising for a few reasons.

Here is a very interesting little Firefox extension that caught my attention: GPhotoSpace. It requires Firefox 3 and leverages the 7GB+ of storage space that you currently get with a Gmail account for an online photo storage repository. I am constantly surprised that people still stick with the many free online storage accounts that only provide 1GB of capacity.

Though the majority of companies have policies pertaining to responding to speculation, sometimes it just gets to a point they have to. For instance, say a rumor makes the rounds (with at least some supporting evidence) that Google has something up its sleeve that might possibly have to do with an operating system. Google can keep mum for a while, but it obviously has to be formally addressed, sooner or later.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.

Open Invention Network along with a series of powerful partners ranging from IBM to the Software Freedom Law Center to the Linux Foundation has unveiled Linux Defenders, a federated effort to shield the open source community from patent trolls. The program calls for open source developers large and small to contribute new open source software inventions to the group's attorneys and engineers so that they can help build moats to to keep out people pushing dubious patent infringement charges. Here's why this is a good idea, where the concept has worked very well before.

Black Duck offers services for managed and secure implementations of open source software, and maintains a giant knowledgebase of over 170,000 open source projects. It's doing very well even in this economic environment, as seen in the story linked to above. Today, the company sent along a collection of myths about open source, responses for which answer some interesting questions.

Are you an Ubuntu developer/Launchpad member who had fate conspire against you, keeping you from the the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week at the clandestine Google Crittenden Campus in Mountain View?

Last week, Net Applications reported Microsoft's operating system share had fallen below the 90 percent mark on the 40,000 or so websites where it gathers its traffic statistics. InternetNews is reporting that Net Applications made another interesting, if puzzling, discovery.

Since the dawn of the distribution, there have been ways to remaster, re-spin, and otherwise rework a Linux flavor into something slightly different -- something that could be replicated and installed across multiple machines. These remastering tools are usually distribution specific (I first tried my hand with this several years back with Knoppix and the Debian live-magic live image creator) and vary in how forgiving (and permissive) they are when new users get too enthusiastic in choosing packages to add and remove.

If you're involved in healthcare IT and also have a fondness for open source, there's a newly formed group at LinkedIn that you may want to know about. The OpenVista Health Information Technology (HIT) group is looking for healthcare professionals who use the popular electronic medical record system and want to swap implementation and deployment ideas.

Stories of a struggling U.S. economy are on everyone's lips these days but some open source companies are doing what they can to help combat the pain. One vendor has decided to forgo a lavish holiday party this year and donate money to a local charity instead, while another is collecting canned food for the needy.

AbiWord has been my favorite open source word processor for a long time, and it's now out in a new version 2.6.5, which adds some excellent features. If you haven't used this application (for Windows or Linux) before, definitely download it, and if you already use it, go for the upgrade. AbiWord has always had excellent support for many file formats, but one of the best things about the new version is that it supports Office Open XML filters, and that means you can open and edit both Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer files with it. Here's more on what's under the hood.

I like MythTV for several reasons. It's not a project for the faint of heart, but it's less the fault of the software than the wild array of hardware that can be conceivably used in nearly every imaginable configuration. It is quite stable, and doesn't require hefty system specs. I didn't think overly about Boxee when I first heard of it. MythTV worked for me.

In addition to the information we provide on open source projects, there are many good sites that allow you to further investigate open source projects before you make the decision to download and install. Sure, you're likely to know SourceForge and Eclipse, but where else can you look? Here are six good choices.

Joi Ito and the Creative Commons need help getting the word out -- and defined. Creative Commons licenses allow (to varying degrees) the content they apply to to be freely used, distributed, and altered, with varying levels of attribution or certain restrictions on commercial use. One of the gray areas Creative Commons has been grappling with is how exactly one defines "non-commercial.

Wow, the competition among open source browsers is getting so heated that you have to stay on top of the day-to-day goings on with the pre-release versions. We've written before about Google Chrome winning speed tests, and I keep hearing people cite it as the fastest browser. Meanwhile, CNet has been posting speed results showing very strong performance from the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (it is indeed snappy). Now, there are some new performance results out that show the nightly builds of Webkit--the open source rendering engine within Safari and Chrome--posting the fastest performance of all.

Today IBM announced that it has teamed with Canonical and Virtual Bridges to offer a Linux-based virtual desktop computing environment. With this product, IBM hopes to emphasize and increase adoption of its Lotus collaboration software, as well as promote the use of Linux (Canonical's Ubuntu) by way of Virtual Bridges' VERDE desktop virtualization platform.

Ubuntu has once again opened up a call for submissions to anyone interested in being a part of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. If you're a musician, artist, photographer, or all-around creative genius and would like to enter your work in the current competition, you've got until February 9, 2009 to submit something to the judges.

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

Distribution naming schemes are one of the more humorous aspects of the open source community. Ubuntu uses an adjective followed by an animal name (Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope), while Debian names releases after characters in the movie "Toy Story" (Sarge, Etch, Lenny). Fedora's method is a bit more obscure, but no less clever.