Google will take a swashbuckling step towards license-free web video playback next month when it open sources the leading video codec from a company it just acquired for $124.6 million, according to a report citing multiple people familiar with the matter.

NewTeeVee reports that Mountain View will open source On2’s VP8 codec at its Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco in mid-May. The publication also says that Google will roll the codec into its Chrome browser, and that Mozilla will do the same with Firefox.

In a surprise announcement, the Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a socking announcement as Songbird has its root in open source. Songbird will however continue to be available for Windows and Mac.

For those who do not know what Songbird is – it is a cross-platform Music Player cum Manager.

Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user’s contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. The initial implementation can import data from Gmail, Twitter, and the local system address book on OS X. It can optionally use the Gravatar service to find contact avatars.

After the add-on has imported and indexed the user’s contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. There are a number of ways that the contact information could potentially be useful in the browser itself. One of Mozilla’s first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form.

Mozilla has pushed out a Firefox developer preview that runs Adobe Flash and other plug-ins as a separate process, hoping to prevent crashing plug-ins from crashing the browser proper.

Mozilla’s new developer preview is the second “pre-release” version of the open source outfit’s Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine. Today’s official Firefox offering - version 3.6 - uses Gecko 1.9.2.

Mozilla is brewing a new extension to the Firefox JavaScript engine, hoping to fix a flaw in its setup that occasionally sends the open source browser back to 2007.

Dubbed JaegerMonkey, the new extension will operate alongside the much-ballyhooed TraceMonkey - an extension that debuted with Firefox 3.5 in June of last year - interpreting JavaScript code unsuited to “tracing.” With Mozilla’s current setup, code that can’t be optimized with TraceMonkey is kicked back to an aging interpreter that runs JavaScript at speeds reminiscent of the dark ages before Firefox 3.5 or Google Chrome.

The JaegerMonkey project is only about two months old - and it’s a ways from testing in a Firefox beta build - but a blog post from Mozilla programmer David Anderson says it’s already providing a 30 per cent performance boost over that old interpreter on x86 machines.

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris community over the project’s potential future with database giant Oracle.

OpenSolaris developers have complained they’ve been “completely ignored” by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project’s future going unanswered.

Project member Peter Tribble blogged here following an open letter to Oracle by OpenSolaris developer and evangelist Ben Rockwood pleading for information about what’s in store for Solaris on February 2.

Rockwood’s appeal came days after Oracle’s high-profile strategy announcement in January that outlined the company’s product plans with Sun, that failed to mention OpenSolaris bar one reference on a slide.

Oracle and former Sun executives instead focused their Solaris talk on the paid version of the Unix operating system that spawned the free and open OpenSolaris project, and its future in joint server, storage, and relational database Exadata appliance.

OpenOffice 3.2 is available for download.

Improvements in the latest release of the open source office suite include faster start-ups, improved compatibility with other office programs, and several new features (with special attention to the Calc spreadsheet program.)

At the same time, the OpenOffice.org team is celebrating its tenth anniversary and a claimed total 300 million downloads of the office software since its initial launch. They say that just over a year since its launch, OpenOffice 3 has logged over one third of those downloads from the central server alone.

According to the OpenOffice team, 3.2’s Calc and Writer components have reduced their start-up time by 46 per cent from version 3.0.

Version 3.2 also boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Two experimental add-ons, Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan code aimed at Windows users. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose Trojan. Both add-ons have been disabled on AMO.

Impact to users

If a user installs one of these infected add-ons, the trojan would be executed when Firefox starts and the host computer would be infected by the trojan. Uninstalling these add-ons does not remove the trojan from a user’s system. Users with either of these add-ons should uninstall them immediately. Since uninstalling these extensions does not remove the trojan from a user’s system, an antivirus program should be used to scan and remove any infections.

Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites.

SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn’t provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time.

The changes have been described as either a re-write of the PHP runtime or a compiler for PHP.

A change to PHP would be Facebook’s latest donation to the language, which has also had contributions from Microsoft and the former Sun Microsystems over the years.

A celebrated Android hacker has released software that greatly enhances Google’s Nexus One smartphone, endowing it for the first time with the same coveted multitouch features that grace Apple’s iPhone.

Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.

Introduced and trademarked by Apple, multitouch gives users the ability to use two or more fingers directly on a device screen to enlarge images and carry out similar actions. While it’s been on the iPhone since day one, certain aspects of the technology were noticeably absent from official releases of Android devices. Google axed the feature at the request of Apple, an unnamed person has told Venture Beat.

Michael Widenius, the creator of the MySQL database, said he is turning his vocal campaign against Oracle’s planned takeover of Sun Microsystems to China and Russia because the European Commission appears set to clear the deal.

The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service last week continued its review of the $7 billion deal, asking for input from interested parties, and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce has yet to approve the deal.

“They are powerful, self-confident and open-source-friendly countries and they have every right and opportunity to do a better job on this than the EU,” Widenius said in a statement.

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm.

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows,” Orr said.

Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.