I wrote last week about the case for open source car software and, lo and behold, BMW might be pushing forward with the idea- albeit not in self-driving cars quite yet. ;)

I've often lamented how few schools in the UK use free software, and how difficult it is to break the lock that Microsoft has on the entire educational system. The pathetic state here is highlighted by contrast with Russia, which is making amazing strides in rolling out open source to schools.

Hadoop is a distributed computing platform that provides a framework for storing and processing petabytes of data. Because it is Java-based, Hadoop runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, BSD, and Mac OS X. Hadoop is widely used in organizations that demand a scalable, economical (read commodity hardware), efficent, and reliable platform for processing vast amounts of data.

Linux stacks such as Moblin and Maemo will dominate the mobile Internet device (MID) market, says a report by ABI Research. The firm expects Moblin to take 42 percent of the market in 2013, when it expects 86 million Linux-enabled MIDs to ship.

Sean Daly and I had the opportunity to interview by email Walter Bender, formerly president of software and content with OLPC and now the founder of Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs is the name of the nonprofit organization being established to support the development of the educational Sugar software, which was originally created for the One Laptop Per Child project.

The basic program is called VistA; the name was chosen well before a Certain Other Company copied the move, and the code began life as an electronic health records system for U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

CompuLab introduced a tiny fanless PC using 4-6 Watts of power. The Linux-ready "Fit-PC Slim" measures 4.3 x 3.9 x 1.2 inches (110 x 100 x 30mm), but includes a 500MHz AMD Geode LX800, Ethernet, VGA output, WiFi, and a 2.5-inch hard drive option, says CompuLab.

I just read that the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that started it first “live” runs today is using KDE for at least some parts of the projects software. This screenshot of a KDE at CERN/LHC looks like a monitoring program (with a knote ;))