Okay, this news hit my inbox and the OSNews queue this morning (and another ten million times during the day) but since I was doing more important things than OSNews today, I only now have the time to dive into this. A site I've never heard before claims that Google will open source the VP8 video codec next month, providing the world with a high-quality, royalty and patent-free codec, which will most likely cause the internet to spontaneously start farting unicorns.

Since the announcement from Opera about submitting Opera Mini to the App Store made it to the front page, I can't really relegate the application's admittance into the App Store to the side column - I'm not particularly liked by the Apple fans as it is. So, here it goes, full frontal: Apple has accepted Opera Mini into the App Store.

We are joined by OSnews user Mark Henderson to discuss iPhone OS 4 and Apple's licence restrictions on third-party development tools. Also discussed is Haiku, QNX, WebKit 2, Theora and Copyright. Please note that the show was recorded before we received news about Palm.

Today, at a press event in San Francisco, Microsoft launched two mobile phones which run a specialised, social media-oriented version of Windows Phone. The devices are aimed at the social generation of teens and twentysomethings (I shall burn in hell for writing that), and while they do not appeal to me (and you, I take it) in any way, shape, or form, they do sport an immensely interesting user interface.

"The LLVM Machine Code sub-project of LLVM was created to solve a number of problems in the realm of assembly, disassembly, object file format handling, and a number of other related areas that CPU instruction-set level tools work in. It is a sub-project of LLVM which provides it with a number of advantages over other compilers that do not have tightly integrated assembly-level tools. This blog post talks about how the MC project evolved, describes a few different aspects of it , talks about the improvements/capabilities it brings to LLVM, and finishes off with the current status of the project."

Despite a relatively solid product, it seems like Palm's last ditch effort to turn the company around have failed. Bloomberg is reporting that the Sunnyvale company has put itself up for sale, and is currently working with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer. They claim both HTC as well as Lenovo are interested in buying Palm.

A developer from the Qumranet team, developers of the KVM virtual machine and Spice Protocol has written about the team's experience in porting the RHEV-M software from C# to Java as a means of making the application cross platform and open sourcing it. The team considered several options including Mono which they discarded as too immature for the job, and Grasshopper technology was discarded as an option since the goal was to open source it and eventually settled on a semi-automated workflow using Java. Red Hat is well on its way towards the goal of making a cross-platform and open source management tool for managing virtual machines in the servers and desktops.

"The fundamental building blocks of all computing devices could be about to undergo a dramatic change that would allow faster, more efficient machines. Researchers at computer firm Hewlett Packard have shown off working devices built using memristors - often described as electronics' missing link. These tiny devices were proposed 40 years ago but only fabricated in 2008. HP says it has now shown that they can be used to crunch data, meaning they could be used to build advanced chips."

Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday to you... Happy birthday dear copyright law... Yeah, it's April 10, the birthday of copyright (thanks, Arnoud). In 1710, 300 years ago, England enacted the very first copyright law, cutely named the Statute of Anne, after then-reigning Queen Anne. When reading about those early days of copyright, one can't help but hope we will return to those days - the Statute of Anne has little to nothing to do with modern copyright.

The backlash is starting to show. The most recent change in Apple's iPhone developer agreement isn't going down well. The change is clearly aimed at increasing lock-in, and seems to have little to nothing to do with anything else. While individual developers are hit hard, Adobe as a whole has been hit pretty hard too, giving rise to sentiments on the web that Adobe should abandon Mac development. I have the sneaking suspicion this is exactly what Apple is aiming for.

This, people, is a big one. Remember all the articles we had on Theora, H264, and which codec is better suited for HTML5 video? Well, it seems that Google has officially decided to put some serious weight behind... Theora. What they're doing is a baby step, but one specific aspect of that baby step is very important: Google is openly stating that Theora is free of patents.

Well, I have to admit I didn't see this one coming. Not too long ago, QNX Software Systems was acquired by Harman International (Harman/Kardon and JBL), and now, six years later, the embedded software specialist has been bought by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Interesting acquisition.

"To be clear about this article's intent, it's not to bash Microsoft, or Windows. Because to be fair, despite using Linux 95% of the time while I'm on the PC, I can find more faults with it than Windows. So, this article's goal is to highlight some of the major pluses of Linux, and also showcase where Windows could improve in the future, should Microsoft take heed of the suggestions."

Now this is interesting. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack has acknowledged that it is generally easier to roll out a, for instance, complex stack of open source server software on Linux than it is on Windows. He also offers a solution - he's working on a project to bring package management to Windows. This project will be community-driven, and Serack has the full blessing from Microsoft.