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Dominique Leca doesn't know if Apple will approve his iPhone app, but he's building it anyway.

The co-founder of Sparrow, a popular Mac desktop client for Gmail, is working on an iOS version of the app, he told Business Insider recently.

It's not unusual for Apple to dominate the news, but this week it was inescapable. Steve Jobs' decision to step down as CEO sent shockwaves through the industry. Jobs' decision doesn't come as a surprise, exactly, but the timing was unexpected. Scott Fulton looked back at Jobs' history with Apple and lessons learned from that. Fulton's coverage on Jobs' departure was joined with four things entrepreneurs should ignore when examining Jobs' legacy.

In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux, we also contrasted the Linux community's approach and achievements with those of Jobs. After the jump, you'll find more on this week's top news stories from ReadWriteWeb's Enteprise, Cloud, Mobile, and Hack channels.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs officially stepped down as CEO of Apple. Today, the Linux kernel turns 20. That makes it as good a time as any to look back and assess – which has shaped computing, and the world, more? Linus Torvalds' "hobby OS," or Steve Jobs?

This might seem like an unfair comparison, one man versus an army of programmers and companies. But that's at the core of the question. Is it Jobs, a leader who pays close and particular attention to detail and focuses on a single mission? Or the Linux community's collaborative but uncoordinated approach that gives free reign to companies to do what they will with the operating system?

We've written many times about modern mobile phones acting as a network of sensors to detect what's going on around their users - but what if those same phones were set to watch existing networks of more traditional real-world sensors? That's what's happening in Japan, where the next version of Apple's iOS includes a unique option in the settings to turn on push notifications for earthquakes. This is probably just the beginning of a paradigm that could spread to other places and other functions where real-time push is a valuable utility - many use cases we can't yet imagine until multiple intersecting systems of technology evolve further.

Japan struggles with earthquakes as much as any country on earth and has an extensive network of sophisticated seismological sensors distributed around the country to try to detect big ones on the way. With the push of a slider (screenshot below), iOS5 users in Japan will be able to receive push notifications from those government sensors automatically (though probably via the mobile carriers). This could be what the future looks like, at least in part.

Those of us who lived and worked in the glorious, adventurous era of computing that was the late 1970s and early '80s have a different perspective. I was a consultant and developer before I became a journalist in 1984. My colleagues from that time and I frame the iPhone and iPad in the broader context of a bigger history. The iPhone, I've seen and heard over the past several hours, has changed people's lives.

Maybe. But what has truly made Apple successful, as a longer-range view of history will reveal, is a set of best practices, not any single gadget or an audio-cassette-ready philosophy on life. Steve Jobs learned these practices and principles through trial-and-error, though he became their most brilliant practitioner. And the fact that he and his company executed on those principles and capitalized upon them, and no other American company in any industry in the past quarter-century has done the same, is the greatest takeaway from the recent history of American business.

Steve Jobs has announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. He will remain chairman of the board of directors. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook has been named as his replacement. The Apple co-founder has taken medical leave for health problems this year, fueling much speculation about Apple's life after Steve. The swift confirmation of Cook as CEO indicates a smooth transition as part of Apple's succession plan.

From inspiring Windows to pioneering creative uses of personal computers to popularizing quality industrial design and mobile media consumption, to finally delivering on the sci-fi promise of tablet computing, Jobs has been at the forefront of global cultural evolution for decades.

Mozilla is continuing in its efforts to disrupt proprietary, single-vendor application ecosystems on mobile devices. This time around the Moz is taking up the task of providing a consistent API so developers can write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices and operating systems. Called WebAPI, the target is to provide "a basic HTML5 phone experience" within six months and submit the API to the W3C for standardization.

In the not-too-distant future, iPhone users may be navigating around using an augmented reality interface that overlays all kinds of data relevant to their immediate location, as well as turn-by-turn traveling directions from one location to another.

Instead of navigating as a little blue dot along a purple line on a 2D, birds-eye-view map, think of the future version of the iPhone's native Maps and Compass apps as something a bit more like Google Street View meets Yelp's mobile augmented reality feature Monocle.

"Our technology is used in every mobile phone," reads a leaderboard-style ad on the home page of InterDigital, a wireless technology company that holds some 8,800 critical patents. An independent assessment last April of the relative value of communications companies' patent portfolios by equity market analysis firm Ocean Tomo LLC rated the key 4G and 3G patents held by InterDigital (of which there are about 20) as about 4% more valuable, and 6% more relevant to significant communications platforms, than Nortel's 20 key patents.

Financial analysts last week had perceived an upcoming InterDigital patent auction as a key opportunity for Google to pull itself back to par after having lost both its bids for the Nortel and Novell portfolios. But that was before last Monday's announcement of Google's intent to acquire Motorola Mobility (MMI).

Apple has begun disabling iPhones, iPads and iPods running the preview version of iOS5 if those devices are not actively being used to develop applications, according to a post on 9to5Mac.

The company typically gives developers early access to the next version of its mobile operating system so that they can prepare and test apps for it. Some iOS developers have been selling unique device identifier (UDID) slots to non-developers so they can gain early access. Up to 100 of these slots are available to developers who pay $100 per year for an Apple developer account.