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Motorola's struggling mobile device division needs more than a RAZR to get out of a close shave. The new strategy? Bank on Android, the promising open source mobile platform that offers development flexibility and heavy developer interest.

A prominent engineer leading work on Google's open-source phone operating system has left to become chief technology officer at the online coupons site.

A prominent engineer leading Google's open-source phone operating system work has left to become CTO at the online coupons site.

Pay The Piper writes 'As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?' (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.) of this story at Slashdot.

Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: 'The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year... 'I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,' Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. 'The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'' of this story at Slashdot.

A survey of more than 300 open source software (OSS) developers found that many plan to distribute their solutions as services over the Internet cloud.