Determining a move toward open source and open standards needs to become a lot less emotional. And to get there companies need to cook up a policy for evaluating a move to open standards and open source.

The Asianux consortium, where Miracle Linux Corp of Japan, Red Flag Software Co Ltd of China and Haansoft Inc of South Korea are jointly developing Linux products, announced Oct. 15, 2007 that it will start shipping its "Asianux Mobile Midinux Edition" mobile Linux product in January 2008. Expected applications are mobile devices with Internet access capability.

Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School has written an interesting paper titled "Putting a Value on Openness: The Effect of Product Source Code Releases on the Market Value of Firms." The research traces the impact of open source on company market valuations from January 1, 1999, to April 30, 2007.

My Classmate PCs arrived today from Intel and I finally had time to break them out tonight. You can find an image gallery here with first looks and some screenshots. I’ll be writing several more detailed posts over the next few days as I actually live with these machines for a while, but I wanted to give my initial impressions to accompany the pictures.

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows. "We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal

“During September and October, there were more than a dozen announcements of new or improved application support for ODF,” said Marino Marcich, managing director of the ODF Alliance. “These recent announcements are a clear reflection of the strong and growing demand for ODF in the marketplace.”

A panel on Internet names voted Wednesday to defer long-simmering questions on whether names, phone numbers and other private information on domain name owners should remain public in open, searchable databases called Whois.

Google took its long-awaited plunge into the wireless world today, announcing that it is leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers that could accelerate the convergence of computing and communications.