"Under an initiative sponsored by the European Commission, the Symbian platform was this week endorsed by the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative and specifically identified as a unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric mobile software development. As a result, a total investment of over EUR 22 million has been committed to the development of next generation technologies for the Symbian platform. This development project is being led by the Symbian Foundation as part of a consortium of major European technology organisations. The consortium is made up of 24 organisations from 8 European countries, comprising major mobile device manufacturers, hardware and service integration professional services, major consumer electronics companies, mobile network operators, application developers, universities and research institutions."

InfoWorld offers a look back at the first decade of agile programming. Forged in February 2001 when a group of developers convened in Utah to find an alternative to documentation-driven, 'heavyweight' software development practices, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development sought to promote processes that accommodate changing requirements, collaboration with customers, and delivery of software in short iterations. Fast-forward a decade, and agile software development is becoming increasingly commonplace, with software firms adopting agile offshoots such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban - a trend some see benefiting software development overall

Every now and then, you get these news item that make you feel like something's wrong. The item doesn't make sense, shouldn't be possible, and yet it is. Despite Microsoft's newfound commitment to web standards, it's still incredibly unnerving to see things like this - the W3C's first HTML5 compliance test, in which Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 6 outdoes all other browsers.

Always wanted to own the IP and trademarks of one of the most innovative computer brands in history? A brand carried by a computer which was easily ten years ahead of its time, capable of multitasking (in colour) with multiple resolutions displayed at the same time, while Windows were still windows and the Mac couldn't hold more than 8 pages in its word processor on its single-tasking monochrome operating system? Yes, Bill McEwen's Amiga, Inc. is selling the Amiga trademark and all associated IP. It's not like the guy was doing anything with it anyway.

MIPS Technologies has said it will put its processor architecture in tablets and smartphones as it prepares to duel rivals Arm and Intel in those fast-growing markets. In September, MIPS released the MIPS32 1074K family of application processors, which it hopes to push into mobile devices. The 1074K is scalable up to 1.5GHz and is capable of multithreading, which the company claims will give it a leg up on Arm processors.

"We all knew that it would come to this and it has finally happened - 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Documents Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Documents Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way."

Do you like VLC on your iPhone or iPad? You don't yet have it installed, but want to? Well, then you'd better be quick about it, as some VLC contributors are unhappy with the fact that VLC is distributed through Apple's App Store, violating the GPL the video player is licensed under. At least, that's what some think.

InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese provides an overview of the 10 best free server tools Microsoft has to offer. 'Free is a term rarely associated with Microsoft offerings, especially at the server end of the spectrum,' Bruzzese writes. Yet remaining competitive has provided Microsoft great incentive to deliver some very powerful server admin tools for free. 'Of course, by and large, Microsoft's free server tools are aimed at offering value to paying customers. But some provide a free entry-level solution for large IT organizations to begin experimenting and small IT organizations to implement.' From Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, to SharePoint Foundation 2010, to migration and planning tools, IT admins would do well to explore the free server tools Microsoft does actually offer.

Gutenprint has been ported to Haiku. "Michael Pfeiffer (wait, what?) intends on ironing out the configuration options and fixing any bugs that users experience. Please test out Gutenprint on Haiku with your supported printer and report back here, or file a bug report if you encounter problems. Anyone with a colour cartridge?"

Mensys has announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 3.2 for active eComStation subscribers. It is offered in several languages like English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian.

The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.

Apple sued Motorola back. Who wants a Pop-Tart? Seriously, why don't they sell Pop-Tarts in The Netherlands? Why do I have to jump through so many hoops just to get Pop-Tarts? Or root beer for that matter? I mean, come on.

The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They’re planning to use Android phones.

Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?