Very little is done quietly in a giant multi-national corporation. Exceptionally high-profile firms like Google undergo even more scrutiny, making it somewhat unusual to discover they've been developing numerous projects — in the open, and Open Source-licensed — that are all but unknown. As odd as it may be, that is exactly the case at Google.

On July 7, internet search giant Google not only announced its operating system Google Chrome OS with much fanfare, it also quietly released Neatx, an open source NX server.

Microsoft appears to be serious about making Outlook more accessible to open source developers. On May 24, the Redmond, Wash software giant announced two new open source projects designed to complement its recently released technical documentation for Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst).

Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop. [...] Although Google has released other projects as open-source software, where it can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, Google Desktop for Linux is proprietary.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

There are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I've rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

Neither Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) nor Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) wants to blink first in the software giant's proposed $41.7 billion takeover of the Web pioneer but as the gamesmanship drags on, archrival Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research), the merger's raison d'etre, is the biggest beneficiary.

Google's protests over the way desktop search is handled in Microsoft's Vista OS have so far fallen on deaf ears. A U.S. district judge denied Google's request to extend Microsoft's antitrust agreement with federal and state governments, essentially saying the matter was none of Google's business. The judge suggested that Google appeal to DoJ, which has shown no sympathy for the search giant.

Google open source guru Chris DiBona says that the web giant continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so "saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.