By "Trefis contributor":

Dell has announced a six-month, open source pilot program aimed at creating an ultrabook suited specifically for web and mobile developers. The Macbook Air and other OSX based machines have become the development environment of choice for a lot of web and mobile developers recently most likely due to software such as iLife, iMovie and other design tools.

Sure, what developers really want is to be able to organise their photos and cut little films. Dell's efforts here are praiseworthy, but iLife and iMovie really aren't the reason why the Macbook Air has succeeded with developers. Try: lightness and SSD.

Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

Great idea. Needs work on the acronym if it wants to appeal to parents buying it for children though.

HP today began executing its plan to deliver an open webOS by committing to a schedule for making the platform’s source code available under an open source license.

The company aims to complete this milestone in its entirety by September.

Released under the Apache 2.0 licence. It's also open-sourcing Enyo, the developer tool that lets you develop for multiple platforms, straight away.

By September, though, the whole landscape will likely look different. Will there be room for webOS then?

"Just a month after insisting there was still a place for its own Hadoop competitor, Microsoft officials have decided to discontinue work on LINQ to HPC [high performance computing], codenamed 'Dryad'.

"In a November 11 post on the Windows HPC Team Blog, officials said that Microsoft had provided a minor update to the latest test build of the Dryad code as part of Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP) 3. But they also noted that “this will be the final (Dryad) preview and we do not plan to move forward with a production release.”

"Dryad was supposed to provide a way for running big-data jobs across clusters of Windows servers. It was designed to provide a platform for developers to build applications that can process large amounts of unstructured data."

Wow. Hadoop is an open source high performance computing effort spun out of Yahoo. Microsoft is really opening up.

"The Government first set out its policy on the use of open source in 2004. This was restated in both 2009 and 2010.

The Government ICT Strategy states that “Where appropriate, Government will procure open source solutions.”

To support this, Action 3 of the Strategy says that “To create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions, the Government will publish a toolkit for procurers on best practice for evaluating the use of open source solutions.”

"The following set of documents make up that toolkit…The purpose of this toolkit is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

"It is intended for those who need to consider, evaluate or procure open source solutions as well as anyone just wanting to know more about open source."

We strongly suspect this is the work of Liam Maxwell. In which case he has moved fast. This bodes well.

"Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building data centers? The Open Compute Project, an initiative begun in April by Facebook, is gaining partners, momentum and structure. Yesterday it unveiled a new foundation and board to shepherd the burgeoning movement."

"Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress.

"But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality. We need to reform them to address this challenge, by adopting these five principles:...."

They're good ones.

Interesting list, and plenty more on GitHub.

Simon Dickson: "I seemed to cause a bit of a stir a couple of weeks back, when I challenged the decision to develop a new Government [web publishing] Machine from scratch, rather than basing it on an existing third-party platform. My blog post got quite a few comments; and there were some interesting exchanges on Twitter too. And now, to the Government Digital Service team's great credit, they've written a post on their own blog, responding to the challenge."

Later, he remarks: "Or if I might paraphrase, somewhat provocatively: they're writing lots of custom code because otherwise, they'd have to write lots of custom code."

"Our stack is pretty standard fare for Google apps these days: we use Java servlets for our server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with the (open-source) Closure framework, including Closure's JavaScript compiler and template system....we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it's an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you're on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don't run into this in practice). <br />
"Our backends are built mostly on top of BigTable and Colossus/GFS, and we use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce (again, like many other Google apps do)."

And no, it's not the Evul Tracking Software thing. Also: about 75% of Android comes from external projects.