If HP wants a future for struggling WebOS, it must invest in the platform, not abandon it, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'It seems HP may only be truly committed to the platform if it can offload the cost of developing and maintaining it. Yet if that's what HP hopes to achieve by opening the WebOS source, it's bound to be disappointed.' Instead, HP should dedicated its own developer resources and 'release as much code as possible under an Apache, BSD, or similarly permissive license. Dual licensing under the GPL might leave HP with more opportunities to monetize the platform, but it won't garner as much interest from hardware makers, who are what WebOS needs most.'

I'm never one to always be negative about something I don't like (he said, casually glancing at his collection of Apple products). Even in the universally despised territory of software patent lawsuits you can find a tiny grain of something positive - if you look hard enough. This time around, it's karma. Due to Apple's aggressive patent lawsuits, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has actually gained in popularity - the exact opposite of the anti-competitive intentions Cupertino had. Update: "The tablet Apple tried to stop". Oh Samsung, you cheeky monkey.

On May 4, 2011, Novell conducted a large round of layoffs as part of its post-merger with Attachmate -- and one of the casualties was the 30-person team that worked on Mono. Fewer than two weeks after Novell swung the axe, de Icaza announced the launch of Xamarin. Xamarin is going strong: The company is generating self-sustaining revenue and is on a steady product launch schedule. (Last week it rolled out Mono for Android 4.0, which lets developers make apps that work with the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.)

The more I look at what HP has had to say about webOS; the more I think the project's as dead as a doornail.

The idiom 'don't judge a book by its cover' can be extended to 'don't judge a computer game by its graphics'. Whilst the games featured in this article have extremely basic graphics, they have many redeeming qualities beyond evoking fond memories of the early days of computer gaming. Text-based games are often forgotten and neglected in the Linux press. However, there are some real ASCII gems out there waiting to be explored which are immensely addictive and great fun to play.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'