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For some, Google has long been a champion of open source, hiring top open-source developers and contributing to a range of open-source projects, in addition to its Summer of Code. To others, Google has been the worst enemy of open source, bumping AGPL-based code of its Code.Google.com and only selectively contributing back to the projects like Linux and MySQL from which it derives benefit.

I’ve been in both camps. One thing is increasingly clear to me, however: Google is opening up to open source.

I noted its Google I/O Conference earlier this week, which will serve open source’s most important constituency: Developers. Steve Shankland writes of Google’s Android as “Google’s highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company’s walls.”

All good. But it’s actually Google’s promised transparency about its crown jewels - its search algorithms - that makes me think Google is finally ready to truly open up. Perhaps this newfound transparency derives from its 61 percent search market share, but the shift is welcome, if still hesitant:

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Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer is bringing new meaning to the term “anger management.”

Howard Stringer

He wants Sony managers to get mad, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Anger-passion, combined with energy, innovation, imagination, and bold steps, is the ticket to get Sony back on track …

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer made a few revealing comments Friday while speaking at a technology conference in Moscow.

The take-away from his speech, according to a Reuters report: Microsoft never viewed its proposed acquisition of Yahoo as strategic.

In other words, Redmond was prepared to pay tens of billions of dollars for a non-strategic acquisition? …

Multiple Kill Vehicle in simulated action.

(Credit: U.S. Missile Defense Agency)

Lockheed Martin said this week it has reached an important milestone in the development of one piece of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System (PDF) puzzle: an interceptor missile capable of taking out multiple enemy ICBM warheads….

Yahoo investors who feel their hands are tied while sitting on the sidelines of a potential Microsoft-Yahoo search transaction may find a crack in the door to weigh in on the deal, legal experts say.

That crack, albeit small, could give Yahoo shareholders the right to vote on whether the …

I’d bet the average person under 30 hasn’t purchased a serious home stereo system in the last five years.

And it’s not because they don’t like music. Quite the opposite, actually. The popularity of online streaming music sites, rise of music blogs, and skyrocketing digital music …

Google co-founder Larry Page was in Washington Thursday trying to strum up support to open unused broadcast TV spectrum to wireless devices.

Page came to D.C. to meet with Congressional leaders and the Federal Communications Commission to talk about allowing device manufacturers to design products that use spectrum known …

As we Twitt-iots sit around bemoaning the fact that we can’t send each other useless junk on a flaky service, I thought I would take this chance to address the notion that this message-scaling problem is new.

It’s not. It’s very common, and it can be solved….

The broad influence of the One Laptop Per Child initiative continues to expand its sphere.

(Credit: OLPC)

Not long ago it was unclear whether the PC–originally conceived as a $100 laptop for children in developing countries–would ever become a reality after a long series of delays. Now the XO laptop

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Update: As of 4 p.m. EDT there was no line outside the Apple store on Fifth Avenue here. Then again, there weren’t any iPhones left to buy either.

NEW YORK–Early on Thursday, Engadget reported that a 60-person line had formed outside the store. But by the afternoon, the …