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Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

Oracle announced today that it will contribute the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Software Foundation, where the free office productivity suite will become part of Apache's incubator program.

The announcement comes after a rocky year for OpenOffice, which was largely abandoned by Oracle and turned over to the community, many of whom in turn forked the project to LibreOffice and created The Document Foundation.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has approved a release candidate for the next version of the Linux kernel: Linux 3.0. According to ConveivablyTech, Linux 3.0 adds support for the Microsoft Kinect, optimizations for newer Intel and AMD platforms, cleancache, updated graphics drivers and more. An announcement from Torvalds also mentions ARM consolidation.

You can find the snapshot here.

RedMonk co-founder and analyst Stephen O'Grady recently gave a talk at Open Source Business Conference. He's posted his notes and slides here. In the talk, he emphasized his idea that there are four generations of software companies, and that selling software is becoming harder and harder. O'Grady sees the way forward for open source companies is leveraging data.

According to O'Grady, the four generations are:

Although Steve Ballmer insisted that Microsoft would continue to support Skype on non-Microsoft platforms when it acquired the VOIP company earlier this month, it looks as though that may not necessarily be the case. And the first casualty seems to be Skype's integration with Asterisk, an open source telephony platform.

Digium, the open source project's maintainer, has informed its users that Skype for Asterisk will no longer be available for sale or activation after July 26. According to the notification, Skype has opted not to renew the agreement that allows Digium to utilize Skype's proprietary software in order to turn the open source Asterisk into a native Skype client.

This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the course materials from all 2000 of the university's courses on the Web.

With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."

The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.

We've covered Microsoft Kinect a few times, particularly the release of the hacked open source drivers for the device. Hackers have been building their own projects with it, and Microsoft will be releasing an official SDK for Windows for the product as well. Windows 8 might make use of Kinect and similar features as well.

But even better than open source drivers for the device would be a completely open source alternative. One candidate for this is TLD, aka Predator, an object tracking system that works with normal web cameras on commodity hardware.

A vice president of engineering at Hewlett-Packard social media snafu, may have released the company's roadmap for building its upcoming cloud service.

Scott McClellan, interim VP of engineering for HP's cloud service, posted the plans on his LinkedIn profile, according to The Register which was able to capture the information before it was taken down. The plans include an "object storage" service built from scratch, "compute," "networking" and "block storage" service which is described as "an innovative and highly differentiated approach to cloud computing." McClellan also reportedly listed working on the user interface for HP's cloud website with "APIs and language binds for Java, Ruby, and other open source languages. Fully functional GUI and CLI (both Linux/Unix and Windows)."

It's not like open field farming. OK, it is a little bit. Marcin Jakubowski, of Open Source Ecology, has taken it upon himself to release the blueprints for 50 farm machines in open source. According to his TED page, this is one element in a more ambitious project.

"Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village."

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