The Oregon State University Open Source Lab’s capacity to support open source projects is being expanded through a donation of $300,000 from Google. That increases the company’s cumulative support of academia's leading open source development center to $750,000.

As arguably the world's largest open-source company, Google has a big stake in maintaining its place at the heart of the open-source ecosystem. Recent events, however, suggest that Google can't rest on its laurels if it wants to secure the hearts and minds of open-source developers.

Anyone following the open source phenomenon can’t help but be amazed at what appears to be volunteerism on a massive scale for corporate gain. Almost every company in the world has some strands of open source code floating around their company.

Google open source guru Chris DiBona says that the web giant continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so "saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.

It's been said that Oracle is now the industry's most powerful open source vendor, but don't tell that to Red Hat executives, who say Oracle doesn't even qualify as an open source company.

Wow, I wasn't expecting this one: Sun is buying MySQL: "the biggest news of the day is... we're putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you're an industry insider, you'll know what that means - we're acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world's most popular open source database."

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.

The folks at open source collaboration platform MindTouch conducted a poll recently to get a sense of who open source executives think are the most influential people in the industry. More than 50 execs were polled from Europe and North America and no one was allowed to vote for anyone in their own company.

Well, it was nice while it lasted. With Android, Google had promised us the ideal of a truly open-source mobile operating system being headed by one of the technology world’s most influential organisations. And now, the company has gone ahead and issued a ‘Cease and Desist’ (C&D) order to one of the most popular Android mods around.