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Google’s complaints about patent-based attacks against Android don’t seem to be doing the company any good. We all know Steve Jobs pledged to destroy Android, claiming it stole its ideas from Apple’s iOS. Yet what is likely an even bigger threat comes from Microsoft, which claims that more than half of all Android devices are now subject to patent licensing agreements.

Clang, the C/C++ compiler for LLVM, can now build a patched version of LibreOffice...

Speaking at this week's AsiaD conference in Hong Kong, Andy Rubin, Google Senior VP of Mobile and the man in charge of Android development, confirmed that the source code for the next major update to Android, version 4.0, will be available as open source "a couple of weeks" after the recently announced Galaxy Nexus smartphone ships next month.

Nokia is re-spinning its Qt project as an independent open source project, promising that cross-platform development framework code will be simultaneously available to Nokia and to the open source community. More details on the new project will emerge at the Qt Developer Days events, scheduled for Oct. 24-26 in Munich and Nov. 29 to Dec. 1 in San Francisco.

Code release by end of the year? Google's Ice Cream Sandwich has been served, and it looks destined to give live-free-or-die open sourcers continued indigestion for now at least.…

Tim Cook, Scott Forestall and Phil Schiller spoke today before a group of eager onlookers at Apple's Cupertino headquarters to announce the iPhone 4S GSM/CDMA smartphone, to be available Oct 14 through AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.

Amazon is rumored to be negotiating with HP to buy its Palm division, including its WebOS assets -- either to create an update to the Kindle Fire tablet, or just to gain patents. Meanwhile, an IHD iSuppli analysis suggests Amazon is selling each Quanta-manufactured Fire for $10 less than it costs to build....

Gnome 3.2 has been released. This time around, the developers have focused on a large number of small improvements rather than big, headline features. That said, there are a couple of interesting new additions in the areas of web integration and personal data management.

Mystery data logger opens backdoor for slurping A data logger pushed out by HTC to Android handsets has opened up a vulnerability allowing any app with internet permissions to access private customer information.…

Recently I published benchmarks of Btrfs from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD (the excellent OCZ Vertex 3 SSD) and those results were interesting, but most people aren't running 6Gb/s solid-state drives, so how does this next-generation file-system perform on the opposite end of the spectrum? In this article are EXT4 and Btrfs benchmarks from an old Core Duo notebook with a 5400RPM mobile hard drive.

It looks like the Samsung Exynos4 DRM driver that first publicly appeared in August will soon be merged into the mainline Linux kernel as the first open-source DRM driver within the kernel for an ARM SoC...

Lenovo's 10.1-inch ThinkPad Tablet is a reasonable alternative to the iPad 2 for enterprise users, says this eWEEK Labs review. This capable Android "Honeycomb" tablet offers business-focused extras like built-in enterprise software, full-size ports, and an effective digitizing pen....

Will Windows 8 prevent Linux from being installed? And where is Linux 3.1 anyway?

Today in New York, Amazon introduced Silk, an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire. You might be asking, “A browser? Do we really need another one?”

Linux groups announce open source project Tizen to develop a Linux-based device software platform supporting smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment. Initial release of Tizen targeted for Q1 2012.

While there are still several days left of this year's Oktoberfest, to take a short break this morning from benchmarking the wonderful beer, food, and Bavarian females, here are benchmarks of the new Intel HiZ Linux support. Just a few days ago a new, nearly ready patch-set was published for implementing hierarchical Z support within Intel's Mesa DRI driver.

Researchers at UC Riverside have received $1.5 million from the NSF and other sources to study a more power-efficient processor that encodes data with charge-density waves (CDWs) rather than electrical currents. A prototype for a CDW-based computer has already been built, showing promise for processors that could & drastically reduce power consumption and increase speed in the next generation of computers,& claim the researchers....

Motorola Mobility is prepping two successors to its Xoom tablet, including an ereader-focused 8.2-inch model according to several reports. In other Android tablet news, the original Xoom did surprisingly well in recent Consumer Reports rankings, Amazon is expected to unveil an Android tablet/ereader on Sept. 28, and Barnes Noble is readying three replacements to the Nook Color....

The University of Texas has teamed up with Intel and Dell to build a Linux supercomputer cluster, as part of the NSF's "eXtreme Digital" program. Due in 2013, the & Stampede& comprises several thousand Dell Zeus servers, each with dual eight-core Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, plus Intel's new parallel computing & MIC& co-processors, and will be & the most powerful x86-based Linux HPC cluster& deployed in the U.S., say the partners....

Over the past few months, members of the KDE community mentored students as a part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). In this annual program, students receive a stipend to write code for a Free Software project, mentored by someone from the project. With KDE participating for the seventh time, students worked on many KDE projects, some of which are already being included in KDE releases. 47 of 51 projects were finished successfully this year. This is the first article featuring students’ achievements in the Google Summer of Code program. read more