Barcelona, Spain -- Apple's iPhone, Google's Android OS platform and Nokia's Maps 2.0 GPS technology are striking a blow against cellular network operators' closed and lucrative business model. Where the operators have long been accustomed to dictating services, applications, device definitions and--most of all--prices, last week's Mobile World Congress here heard a cry for openness: for applications and services that can run independently of cellular operators on any mobile device.

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength. The observation? That IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies.

Many image editing programs have a library or "scrapbook" where you can store images for future use. You can then open this scrapbook (within the image editing app) and drag and drop the image into the image you're working on(usually as a new layer). You can easily create a scrapbook for Gimp and store images for future use to edit and incorporate in all your photo projects.

Launchpad is kinda hard to describe. When I’m asked what it is, I normally use three or more of the words “open source free software support project Q&A code registration bugs management listing bazaar planning hosting”. Most people make comparisons to Sourceforge, Savannah, Berlios and Google code hosting, and while those are useful, it’s only a part of the picture. The other part, which is perhaps not as well understood, is that it’s also a public project registration service, similar to Freshmeat. Well, except for a twist.

When I was CEO for Linspire, I started work on CNR.com. The goal for CNR.com was to become the central repository for all desktop Linux software for all of the most popular Linux distributions. I wanted to move heavily in this direction, because CNR was the one area where Linspire had a technological and branding advantage, and was also the one area where Linspire could actually make money.

Web 2.0 was marked by web-based applications. But the major limitation to all these services is that they existed solely in the realm of the Internet, and data was stored on somebody else's servers.The introduction of Ajax RE's is poised to change all that, allowing coders to write applications using existing technologies to merge the desktop with the web.

openGEU is another extremely successful Ubuntu child, running Enlightenment 17 as the desktop manager. Like gOS, another Ubuntu & Enlightenment distro reviewed some time ago here at Dedoimedo, openGEU offers a healthy refreshment of color and choices to the already well-established distro.