Today sees the launch of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to make learning and teaching materials freely available online, to improve the quality of education in schools in South Africa and the rest of the world, leveraging the potential for open collaboration on the Web.

"In high-technology markets, disruptive innovation is something to be taken as a given, like gravity. Businesspeople do their best to exploit it, avoid it or cope with it. Industry upstarts depend on it, while established companies fear it. But no one in the competitive world of high technology thinks they can stop disruptive innovation, any more than they can alter the laws of gravity. But what if you could? What if an industry could banish disruptive innovation, leaving only a "well-mannered marketplace" of incremental innovations that reinforced comfortable business models?

In one of the most significant moves yet in the growing push toward service interoperability on the Web, tech giant Yahoo announced Thursday that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in.

A design center in the South of France specializing in Linux mobile phone development has opened offices in Beijing. Purple Labs's China office will be headed by newly appointed GM of Asian sales Gordon Tsang (pictured at left), formerly of Openwave.

To say there is a lot of debate about MS Windows XP on the OLPC XO is an understatement. What confuses me is that everyone is getting angry about it only now. I was already complaining about it in April 2007!

I’m on an Edubuntu users mailing list where, more often than not, veteran users can answer questions for new users. I usually give it a quick skim for any new features or fixes and then leave it to accumulate like so many other pieces of information in my Gmail account (hooray for increased storage!).

Even the unadventurous Israeli education system may soon discover that there is (computerized) life after Microsoft. The country's schools will forgo Word and Windows in favor of parallel programs from Sun Microsystems. For the first time, the education system's tenders committee has authorized cooperation in principle with Sun, in a move that could undermine Microsoft's sovereignty in Israeli classrooms.

While not as sexy as the BMW Z4M or some of the other automobiles on display during CES, we had learned an interesting fact about the driver-less Carnegie Mellon vehicle: it runs Ubuntu.