A U.S. court's antitrust oversight of Microsoft is ending after eight and a half years, with some observers questioning what the long fight accomplished. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's oversight of a twice-extended November 2002 settlement agreement between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice ends Thursday.

"At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Google said that Chrome OS notebooks, now called 'Chromebooks', will be available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain starting June 15, and that it will be offering a combined software and hardware subscription service for businesses, schools, and government customers. The pricing of Google's subscription plan is modest: For $28 per user per month, businesses will receive Chromebooks, Web-based administration controls, enterprise-level support, a warranty, and hardware replacement upon subscription renewal. Schools and governments have access to the subscription package for $20 per user per month." Look at the concept here.

"Representatives from Apple and Google faced hard questions about their location and privacy policies when testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on Tuesday. Apple VP of Software Technology Guy 'Bud' Tribble and Google Director of Public Policy Alan Davidson both stood behind their companies' policies at the hearing, however, while continuing to insist that they take consumer privacy seriously."

Apple has released the source code for WebKit in iOS 4.3, which it had been withholding for eight weeks. However, according yo Jay 'saurik' Freeman, they are still not, and never have been, in compliance with the LGPL. "Apple's provided source code (which /is/ heavily modified for the iPhone) isn't even complete enough to compile (it is missing a bunch of code for the WAK* classes), so Apple has simply never been in compliance with this license," Saurik writes. So, it would seem that Apple is still violating the LGPL, and has been doing so for a very long time. Funny how this never makes it to mainstream technology sites. I guess they find their pre-release review devices more important.

AMD Embedded Solutions has gained a great appreciation for the value of coreboot to our ecosystem and continues to build momentum by adding support for our existing products, adding new features, and introducing a roadmap for support going forward." Let's hope regular boards are next. BIOS needs to die.

The Apple/ARM rumor du jour is that Apple will transition its entire portable Mac line to ARM-based CPUs, dropping Intel altogether. Sources speaking to Semi Accurate claim this is a "done deal," and the move should happen by 2013, when a 64-bit ARM A15 core becomes available. While a future generation of Apple's A5 processor could make some sense for something akin to the MacBook Air, the claim that Apple will ditch Intel wholesale for ARM just doesn't add up.