Yet, as a user, I feel that both Chrome and Jolicloud have too much of the centralization that I moved to open source to escape. In fact, both seem a step backwards in usability, evoking uncomfortable reminders of the awkwardness of the bulletin boards of the early 1990s.

Everyone has posted their predictions for 2010 but here's the real scoop on what's going to happen in 2010 with Linux and Linux-oriented hardware and software products. Get ready to see the biggest increase in Linux adoption in history. You can say you saw it here first. These are in no particular ranking or order.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

ASUS plans to develop an educational robot for kids called the EeeBot that uses software based on Google's Android mobile operating system.

Dell announced Thursday that it's offering a memory module called Latitude On Flash that can boot up a computer in seconds. Dell's Latitude On Flash module snaps into an internal mini-card slot and allows computers to boot in a few seconds, using the laptop's main x86 processor.

According to AndroLib, Google's Android Market has just crossed the 20,000 application milestone. The new milestone comes just over three months after reaching the 10,000 mark and shows strong application growth for the open source mobile operating system.

It's certainly been quite a decade in the world of enterprise operating systems: There have been some spectacular winners, like Linux, and few epic failures, like Microsoft Vista.

When you say that something is expensive, you have to say also, compared with what? This comparison cannot only be on price. You have to compare value received. What is the value of an education, then? In crass financial terms, you can set a price on education based on the Net Present Value of expected earnings over a lifetime.