It is ironical that the telephone, the internet and other communication technologies we think help to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor, could widen it. This is because issues of cost and access will continue to create groups of info-rich and info-poor people. Considering that better prospects for economic activity take place in the realms of information, knowledge and communication in general, people who cannot afford them certainly lose out.

Communications chip giant Broadcom has joined the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, an industry group building a shared Linux stack for mobile phones. The company said it hopes to work with the Foundation to reduce Linux's power requirements, size, and cost, in order to "achieve widespread adoption of Linux-based handsets."

Microsoft has made progress in getting its Windows software to work on a low-cost laptop computer for poor children that currently runs on rival Linux software, an executive said Thursday.

The last time we wrote about Microsoft’s ‘dumping crusade’ against GNU/Linux was just under a fortnight ago. This collective item included a new incident and references to our previous writeups about Microsoft’s DreamSpark [1, 2] — essentially another attempt to further close the World Wide Web, making it more Microsoft Windows-dependent.

Question: Asus makes an innovative cheap little Linux computer that takes the world by storm but decides to fix what isn't broken and make it more expensive, why? The power of Microsoft of course! And so yet another attempt by a Linux purveyor to carve a niche in mainstream consumer computing looks set to fall to Windows. Or will it?

Broadcom said Linux is gaining momentum in mobile phones and that it would work with LiMo Foundation members to address power consumption, size and cost, in an effort to achieve widespread adoption of Linux-based handsets.

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project is in the final steps to finally ship the first laptops to poor children living in poor countries.

Yesterday we wrote about the poor recent interview with Ron Hovsepian, CEO of Novell. The interview was poor for a variety of reasons, some of which were already mentioned in previous posts, but one largely overlooked issue was the attack on Sun.

This article contains a list of seven valuable--and best of all, free--applications for Windows Mobile devices. Most of 'em work on Windows Mobile Professional smartphones or Pocket PCs, some work on both and a couple are for Windows Mobile Standard. There's an uber RSS reader thingee, a free backup app and more.

Microsoft wishes it could charge for these...