Government was once the great hope for open source but it will continue to diminish due to a lack of support according to the CIOs of Australia's largest government agencies.

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference. Article and video.

So far, I’ve identified examples of free, commons-based production of just about every category of pure information product which exists. And that leads to the next question: what about the material marketplace? Can community methods be used to design, prototype, and manufacture physical products?

Forgive The VAR Guy if he says “I told you so.” Earlier this month he predicted that Asterisk — the open source IP PBX — would win a global distribution deal. He was right. Specific details about the news, involving Digium — one of the top Asterisk companies — emerged today. Here’s the scoop.

Check out Nokia’s point of view on What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help, in the words of Ari Jaaksi. Building upstream following community rules is in the heart of this plan. This is what Nokia has been doing, learning and contributing back a lot. Now it’s time to dive deeper.

"Many manufacturers are using proprietary systems. Linux is the newcomer. It has not been around long enough. It needs a large shift for the auto industry to more openly accept Linux in these areas," Peter Schulmeyer, director of strategy and microcontroller solutions for Freescale Semiconductor, told LinuxInsider.

Analyst firm Research and Markets has just put out a project on Linux-based server and client hardware sales, and is projecting that the market will more than triple between 2007 and 2012.

As hardware gets smaller and cheaper, we can expect to see Linux in more and more unexpected places. Why is this, and how does this benefit open-source developers?