I bumped into Dirk Hohndel, Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, at OSCON last week and started probing him on Intel's open-source activities. As it turns out, for a hardware company, Intel writes a heck of a lot of software. Dirk and I found time to talk about Intel's open-source involvement in depth. This interview was born.

Big tech companies don't always mean what they say when they make promises about open source.

This afternoon Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, talked about why Intel's commitment to open-source drivers creates a difference and advantage for Intel's architecture platforms

To accelerate the process of getting more people using Chrome OS and getting them using Google online services, information is coming to light from our industry sources that indicates Google may very well plan to battle Intel and Microsoft on 2 separate fronts to win the OS, browser and services wars.

Intel will work with Google on the development of its Linux-based Chrome operating system for netbooks, the chipmaker's open-source technology chief has said. Imad Sousou, who is in charge of the Moblin mobile Linux project, told ZDNet Asia's sister site, ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Intel did not view Moblin as a competitor to other versions of Linux.

It appears that later this month Intel will be announcing a new technology that will be open-source. While what exactly is being launched is not known, from the information provided it is an open-source Intel technology that may deal with optimizing your software to take advantage of multiple computing cores.

As arguably the world's largest open-source company, Google has a big stake in maintaining its place at the heart of the open-source ecosystem. Recent events, however, suggest that Google can't rest on its laurels if it wants to secure the hearts and minds of open-source developers.

Nokia and Intel have announced a new strategic partnership for mobile development. This is big news for open source, since both Intel and Nokia rely on Linux (and open source) for their respective mobile platforms.

Intel and Nokia are two of the largest tech companies on the planet, but when it comes to developing a new mobile operating system, they've opted to not just team up, but to enlist the legions of open source developers out there.