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Users of apps from BIRT, the open source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, will be able to access them on the iPhone starting Monday. Actuate, which founded the BIRT project and coleads it with the Eclipse Foundation, is putting its BIRT Mobile Viewer on the App Store. This viewer, which will be a free app, is a native iPhone application that will let users access and control BIRT content through Actuate’s servers at no charge.

Excerpt from:
iPhone Gets Down to Business With Open Source BI App

At the end of business last Friday, Google announced it had completed the transaction to acquire On2 Technologies, the maker of Web video encoding software and codecs, for a deal that was finally valued at $124.6 million. On2 was a small company that was, in recent quarters, losing small amounts of money. It was attempting to become lucrative at some point through the licensing of a new generation of its VPx codec platform — called “VP8″ — announced way back in the fall of 2008. Customers were supposed to have included Move Networks and Skype.

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What Google Really Wants From On2 Deal

Microsoft and Amazon have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal that covers, among other things, Amazon’s Kindle and its use of Linux-based servers. The agreement calls for Amazon to pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money. Microsoft has forged similar deals with other companies that market Linux or use it in their own operations, raising hackles in the FOSS community. The latest deal renews questions about Microsoft’s intentions.

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Amazon Ponies Up to Microsoft for Linux Rights

After nearly four years of legal battle, a case involving the unauthorized use of open source software last week came to a final conclusion that affirms the legal right of open source developers to collect damages when their code is used improperly. The case of Jacobsen v. Katzer dates back to 2006, when Robert Jacobsen, a developer at Java Model Railroad Interface, claimed that Kamind Associates’ Matthew Katzer had used part of his open source code in another product without giving credit. Such attribution was required in the Artistic License under which the software was covered.

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FOSS Dev Gets Damages in Precedent-Setting Model Train Case

I was a bit distracted from the Apple iPad news due to the marathon Oracle conference last week on its shiny new Sun Microsystems acquisition. However, the more I thought about it, the more these two companies are extremely well-positioned to actually fulfill what other powerful companies tried to do and failed. Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades. Apple is well on the way to dominating the way that multimedia content is priced and distributed.

Continued here:
Apple and Oracle: Will the Real Tech Titans Please Stand Up?