Flash Player 9 Update includes all of the features from the release versions of Flash Player 9 (9.0.16.0 and 9.0.20.0) for supported platforms. In addition to bug fixes and minor enhancements, this release introduces support for full screen mode in the web player and support for Windows Vista. These release notes document known issues related to the beta versions of Flash Player 9 Update.

When server and network management software from a proprietary software vendor costs ten times as much as an open source alternative, the decision to go the open source route might seem obvious.

Make that open-source alternative a hosted offering, and you lighten the load even further, freeing the IT staff of server and network management duties.

At the first community meeting for San Francisco WiFi1 earlier this week, Google fielded questions from vocal community advocates2, but also showed off what kind of hardware users would likely need to access the planned free network. One of those devices was a WiFi router based on an open platform called the Meraki Mini, made by Mountain View-based startup Meraki3, which we wrote about last August4.

When we talked to Google’s Chris Sacca after the community meeting he said that Google funded Meraki a few months ago with an “open source development grant” to help the company keep parts of its technology open source, and to work with Google’s muni WiFi deployments.

As we draw closer to an anticipated beta release of the Flash Player, we thought people might be interested in knowing what libraries their host systems will be expected to provide for the Player. We have boiled it down to this list:

Opposition to a new version of the licence for open source OS Linux is growing, with a number of prominent developers joining originator Linus Torvalds in criticising changes in wording.

The executive summary of what follows would probably be: ensuring that a single plugin binary functions on the widest diversity of Linux/x86 distributions within reason. Read on for the details.

Now that Debian is not allowed to use the Firefox name without showing every patch to Mozilla, people are boycotting Firefox. That is not all that will come of this though. How will this affect Ubuntu? Could Mozilla turn into a Microsoft, only caring about trademarks? This article attempts to clear things up about the Mozilla trademark situation.

"I see that there is still a lively debate concerning our choice of user interface (UI) toolkit for Flash Player 9. To review, we selected GTK, mostly because the Player 7 codebase we started with already implemented a bunch of stuff with GTK."