Google are never one to rest on their laurels, and the past few months have seen a lot of changes to Google’s search pages that you might have easily missed.

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye).

Anyone connecting form Iran is blocked from accessing certain Google sections (Google Summer of Code 2009 site in the example)

ApacheMap plots the location of each Web hit your site receives on a Google Map. The utility converts IP addresses from Apache logs into longitude and latitude information using hostip.info.

According to data presented by DiBona, Google's Open Source programs manager, the GPLv3 license now represents more than half of the GPL licensed code that Google hosts on its Google Code site. What DiBona's data shows is that developers are embracing GPLv3 and using it for their project in growing numbers.

The other day a friend came to me with a problem, he had been surfing the internet for information about the conficker worm virus. As he misspelled the name as configer virus he didn't find a lot of real information on this virus. What he did find was a lot of links to site which were indicated by google as harmful to your computer.

Google Code is a web service which offers to provide project site hosting for Free Software projects. But if you care about your own and your fellow developers and users' privacy and freedom, there are reasons to avoid using it.

Google isn't only crawling your Web site, it's looking at your source code as well. That was the introduction for Chris DiBona, the open source programs manager at Google, one of several keynote speakers here at OSCON 2009 today.

"How am I to continue supporting the growth of Firefox if they're gonna chalk it up to Google to control what sites we should visit? They're putting us in a position from which supporting Firefox is getting to be equal to supporting Google's further grip on the market. That's NOT making me happy."