At the close of the stock market on Wednesday, Apple s value as a company surpassed Google NSDQ: GOOG s. Apple s market capitalization reached $158.84 billion; Google s settled at $157.23 billion.

Silicon Valley tech gossip blog Valleywag predicted as much back in November 2007 based on the strong performance of Apple s iPhone and the fact a Google phone was nowhere to be seen.

Nine months later, there s still no Google Android phone on the market and Apple s iPhone 3G remains in short supply. Not only that, but Google has nothing yet that can challenge Apple s iTunes tollbooth.

Google has demonstrated its might as online advertising s middleman; it has yet to show that it can win the loyalty of phone buyers. And it needs to do just that, soon, before Apple s iPhone achieves the kind of dominance that its iPod has in the music player market.

Google doesn t yet have a diversified revenue stream like Apple does. And it still depends on the forbearance of Microsoft and Apple for distribution. It has user loyalty, but not much leverage, particularly where Internet browsers aren t involved. If users of computers and phones start leaning toward Internet-enabled apps like iTunes rather than browsers, Google will find it much harder to keep its foot in the door.

And that s the way Google s competitors will erode Google s position. They won t beat Google as a search engine. That ship has sailed. But what they can do is change the nature of the playing field. That s what Apple is doing.

Wordpress 2.6.1 released today, however If you’re happy with 2.6, keep on using it. You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.

2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users. Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed. For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

In a crucial win for the free software movement, a federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material.

The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it’s been released for free into the so-called “open source” software community.

People are free to use that material in their own products, but they must credit the original authors of the programming code and release their modifications into the wild as well, a cycle that’s critical for free software to continue improving.

Because the code was given away for free, thorny questions emerge when a violation has been discovered and someone is found to have shoved the code into their own for-profit products without giving anything back, in the form of attribution and disclosure of the alterations they made.