Google Android flaws exposed

Google's popular Android mobile platform kernel contains more than 350 software flaws, one-fourth of which are high-risk for security breaches and system crashes, a newly released analysis of the open platform has found, says Dark Reading.

The Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report reveals the findings of testing by Coverity of more than 61 million lines of open-source code from 291 open-source projects, including Android, Linux, Apache, Samba, and PHP.

Coverity specifically studied the open Android kernel 2.6.32 of an HTC Droid Incredible smartphone, but the report says other Droids are likely have the same defects.

Former Sun Microsystems chief and co-founder Scott McNealy has re-appeared to champion open-source and rough up billionaire Larry Ellison, the man who bought his baby, reports the Register.

Speaking at PostgreSQL West 2010, McNealy urged developers to drive adoption of their database against Oracle's proprietary products and MySQL by working with other open-source projects, uniting with business folks, and making their software simpler for ordinary - less-technical - users.

McNealy reckons there's plenty of opportunity for open-sourcers to help customers escape the data lock-in of Oracle as well as IBM and Microsoft - what he called a "roach motel" for data.

The latest free version of open-source operating system distribution, Fedora 14, was recently released by Fedora Project, which is the sponsored and community-supported open-source collaboration of Red Hat, writes TMC.

Several new features are supported by the latest version that will benefit developers, system administrators as well as open-source enthusiasts.

In a press release, Jared Smith, Fedora project leader, said: “I'm very proud of the work that has been put into Fedora 14. A myriad of contributors have helped to make free and open-source software more pervasive with this release.”