Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software.

While stopping short of volunteering to host the event, Mozilla chief security official Window Snyder said that it could prove helpful for the open-source community to meet at its own conference to debate secure coding, vulnerability reporting, and product patching issues.

Google has called Oracle's Android lawsuit an attack not only on Google but also on the open-source Java community. "We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Google and the open-source Java community with this baseless lawsuit," a company spokesman said in a statement to USA Today.

Who's the first company you think of when the words "open source" come up in conversation? Red Hat? Canonical? MySQL? Well, if Google co-founder Larry Page is to be taken seriously, apparently it ought to be Google.

The BBC is reporting on some comments that Page made at a recent round-table meeting with reporters.

"Google has released an open source browser plugin that provides a JavaScript API for displaying 3D graphics in web content. Google hopes that the project will promote experimentation and help advance a collaborative effort with the Khronos Group and Mozilla to create open standards for 3D on the web.

Hours after Oracle filed suit against Google for patent infringement, Google has made it very clear that it will stand its ground. “We are disappointed Oracle has chosen to attack both Googleand the open-source Java community with this baseless lawsuit,” Google said in a statement to Mashable earlier today.

People contribute to free software in many ways. Some write the stuff; some write *about* the stuff, spreading the word; and some actually spread open source directly by giving away systems to those who need them. We hear a lot about the stars of first group, and the second group make a lot of noise on their own. But too often we take the third group for granted.

Google apparently likes open source that lets it "borrow" open-source software while giving comparatively little back, and always on Google's terms.

Google engineer John Koleszar asked the open source community for help optimizing the VP8 codec for the WebM project, Google's open source project for watching video online. In soliciting help, Koleszar gave a sort of State of the Codec Address regarding VP8, it's functionality and the headway he and his fellow programmers have made since the WebM announcement at Google I/O 2010.