Contrary to what many might be thinking, particularly after comments made by Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison two weeks ago, Solaris 11 will be enthusiastically supported on both Sparc and x86 platforms – and not just Oracle's own x86 platforms, but those made by others.

"I don't care if our commodity x86 business goes to zero," he said "We don't make any money on it. We have no interest in selling other peoples' IP. Commodity x86 includes Intel IP, and Microsoft IP. We don't make money selling that. Sun sold that stuff, and we are phasing out that business. We have no interest in it whatsoever. We have interest in selling systems that include our IP. That's how we are going to drive the profitability of our overall hardware business – eventually."

As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%.

The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage point since January 2011, representing a 50% increase.

During that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip.

TDF and LibreOffice were originally founded in response to the long-standing governance problems that have historically afflicted OOo. Under Sun's leadership, bureaucratic barriers and concerns about the project's copyright assignment policy impeded participation in OOo development. Friction between Sun, independent community members, and other corporate contributors created an unhealthy environment for collaboration. The problems only worsened after Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

In April, after seeing OOo abandoned by many users and contributors, Oracle gave up the fight and made a token effort to spin off OOo as a community project. In a somewhat petty move, Oracle decided to hand off OOo to the Apache Software Foundation rather than TDF—preventing OOo from being reunited with its former community.

It's being called an accident, but it could also be a show of force: a piece of state propaganda from China shows an attack being launched against Falun Gong computers.

The newspaper translates the labels in the image as "Select attack target", a drop-down list of Falun Gong Websites, and an "attack" button.

The Epoch Times says the video identifies the software as being written by the Electrical Engineering University of the People's Liberation Army

At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site's mailing list.

Now, things have taken a turn for the worse: Cnet has begun wrapping downloads in a proprietary installer.

Cnet thinks we're clueless enough to believe that their motivation is really to provide users with a less painful download and installation process. Because opt-out toolbars and homepage changes make software setup less annoying.

A short while ago, Ubisoft announced the latest Driver sequel would require players to be handcuffed to a solid internet connection in order to fully utilize its "Always On" DRM.

"We've heard your feedback regarding the permanent internet connection requirement for Driver and have made the decision to no longer include it. So this means that Driver PC gamers will only need to sign in at game launch but can subsequently choose to play the game offline."

While this concession makes it slightly less annoying to play Ubisoft's game, the fact remains that this minor compromise doesn't alter the general "treat everyone like thieves" principle behind it.

Mozilla is now offering Firefox 6.0, a mere two months after Firefox 5.0 made its debut. Mozilla's sped-up release cycle could give the enterprise some headaches.

The organization also moved Firefox 7 to beta, according to a posting on the MozillaWiki.

"Enterprises are built of people," Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs tweeted June 28, "and Mozilla is fundamentally about people. We support Firefox users wherever they are."

Here's the dirty secret Amazon don't want you to know, they don't pay developers a single cent.

Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon's secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day.

Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion.

To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds, and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand.

We recently reported on how Driver: San Francisco will require a constant internet connection to play.

Ubisoft have traditionally been the developer with some of the harshest DRM in the industry. In the games that use their always online "connected services", players can no longer to play if no internet connection is detected.

Sadly, legitimate players often take the brunt of such security measures. Intermittent internet connections and server issues at Ubisoft's end can stop PC Gamers from playing the game entirely.

Scientists see their software as a kind of exoskeleton, an extension of themselves. Think Dr. Octopus. The software may do heavy lifting, but the scientists remain actively involved in its use. The software is a tool, not a self-contained product.

Programmers believe it's their job to encapsulate intelligence in software. If users have to depend on programmers after the software is written, the programmers didn't finish their job.