Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is pretty darn confident the European Union will soon approve Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems and MySQL. Still skeptical? Ellison is planning a big announcement on January 27. Here are the details.

YouTube have announced a beta of HTML5 support. These are broadcasting videos in H.264 format for browsers that understand HTML5's tag. The choice of H.264 is perhaps unsurprising, since that's what Apple's iPhone supports natively (and indeed, is how the YouTube mobile application is rendered). This means that other browsers that don't support H.264 won't be able to render content.

Patents are the only threat that Microsoft can brandish against free and open source software and that is exactly why people should be wary of the Mono project, free software advocate and Samba hacker Jeremy Allison told a packed auditorium at the 11th LCA today.

Want to have some fun using a web-cam on Ubuntu? I suggest you get your hands on the Cheese application. One thing is for sure, your Facebook profile shots will never be the same.

Here are two nice Google chrome themes for Ubuntu ...

Analyst Gartner released a report that says IT spending globally will grow this year a total of nearly 5% over 2009 and reach $3.4 trillion.

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

While the greater free software community, media outlets, conferences and projects are finding diverse ways to draw women to open source, the GNOME Foundation's Outreach is built on a familiar framework.