ReadWriteWeb

The Google Open Source Program is announcing a new outreach effort, aimed at 13- to 18-year-old students around the world. Google Code-in will operate in a similar fashion to Google's Summer of Code, giving students the opportunity to work in open-source projects.

Google Code-in will match students to mentoring organizations and will give them a chance to do real-world development on open source projects. Tasks for participating students can include writing code, creating documentation, training others, testing code, UI research and design, and community outreach.

Puppet Labs, the commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announces today its acquisition of an open source project called The Marionette Collective. The Marionette Collective, also known as MCollective, is a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.

Puppet Labs' open-source software helps system administrators configure and automate server management, rather than relying on manually built scripts with little portability or reusability. The addition of MCollective's real-time network discovery capabilities will improve the way in which users can schedule activities. MCollective enables server orchestration or parallel job execution systems. It enables real-time discovery of network resources and can select which resources to affect based on configuration data.

In August, Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that its Android software infringes on patents and copyrights related to Java, patents acquired when Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems. And today, Google expanded on its initial comment that the Oracle lawsuit was "baseless," with a detailed response to the lawsuit's claims, and asking the U.S District Court to dismiss the suit.

Google's motion refutes Oracle's allegations, claiming it has not infringed on any Oracle IP. contains a "Factual Background" section, detailing the history of Java, its development, Sun's decision to open source part of it, and Oracle's voice among others encouraging the full open-sourcing of Java - right up to the point when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Researchers at RMIT's School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences developed a method for integrating spatial coordinates into an SMS text message and released the technology for doing so as an open standard called GeoSMS. The standard has now been put to use in the first mainstream mobile application, an Android reference app called "I Am Here," available now in the Google Android Market for free.

In order to help offset the costs of delivering an increasing amount of video, Wikipedia is experimenting with BitTorrent P2P technology.

As Michael Dale notes in the foundation's announcement, "One potential problem with increased video usage on the Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images that make up Wikipedia articles today. Eventually bandwidth costs could saturate the foundation budget or leave less resources for other projects and programs. For this reason it is important to start exploring and experimenting with future content distribution platforms and partnerships."

The open source microblogging service StatusNet - the power behind identi.ca - announced today the release of its iPhone app.

The app makes it easy to connect via mobile to a StatusNet site, and it supports posting from an iPhone, sending attachments, as well as following public, profile and friends' timelines. Users can connect to accounts on multiple StatusNet sites from within the app.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates communication technology including the Internet, was once credited with having the worst website in federal government.

But the agency is committed to upgrading its technology under the leadership of Microsoft veteran Steven VanRoekel. The FCC has been beefing up its developer offerings and it announced today that the new website will be built using the open source content management system Drupal.

Oftentimes, when you hear the arguments for "Why open source?", they are aimed at convincing companies to use open source software. But the other piece of the argument is, of course, an argument for why your company should build open source - why it should develop its technology in a community-driven, open sourced way.

Along those lines, Peter Friese, head of mobile development at Itemis recently wrote an article arguing "Why Your Next App Should Be Open Sourced."

He lists the following "pro open source" reasons:

If The Graduate were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be "just one word... statistics."

The explosion of digital data has generated a need for technology to store, serve, and analyze petabytes of data. But it's also creating a lot of opportunities for people who are trained in the field of statistics. And more and more, that training involves learning R, the open source statistical programming language.

"Revolutionary." "Disruptive." These terms are used with such frequency that they may have lost much of their meaning. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of products and services that are innovative, and plenty of systems, plenty of organizations that are ripe for disruption or "revolution." Take education, for example. Our modern education system is, after all, not so modern, with many of its practices strongly rooted in a "factory" model circa the Industrial Revolution. But what does revolutionizing education really look like? And which startups working in education technology are really "disruptive"?

A recent thread on Quora bypasses the "revolutionary" and "disruptive" adjectives, asking instead "What are some interesting startups in the education space?" But a recent blog post at The Teaching Master does invoke these adjective, listing the "Top 25 Web Startups Revolutionizing Teaching." Neither the Quora nor the Teaching Master post offer metrics. There's no indication of what makes a "top" startup or what constitutes "interesting," let alone "revolutionary" work in the ed-tech space.