Intel has announced today that it is acquiring software-maker Wind River Systems for $884 million. Wind River makes embedded devices.

Embedded systems and mobile devices include smart phones, mobile Internet devices, other consumer electronics (CE) devices, in-car "info-tainment" systems and other automotive areas, networking equipment, aerospace and defense, energy and thousands of other devices.

Microsoft has filed a patent for a "Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience." The exact words of the filing’s abstract are as follows:

Reports have been surfacing since last night’s election that while overall, India seems to have embraced the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States, there have been some worries among the country’s people due to Obama’s position on outsourcing.

IBM has opened a social software research center dedicated to helping customers and partners better collaborate on a global scale. The center is headquartered at Cambridge, and staff will work closely with university faculty and students, as well as corporate partners.
 

Quebec’s open source organization Facil is suing the province’s government for spending millions of dollars on Microsoft software, and never entertaining the idea of using anything open source. The problem here is that there is no room for competition  because the government automatically goes to Microsoft.

It’s no secret that there’s money in open source software. So naturally, along with it comes some rules.

"Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material."

So says the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The incremental update of Opera Mini to version 4.1 gave the little browser faster operation and a few extra features.

If you remember correctly, Google bought the Urchin Software Corporation in 2005, and reformed Urchin software to Google Analytics. The one major change in the software was that Google allowed Analytics to be free.

Hey Everyone, The Zune Software is currently up on Zune.net.

» You can find the software HERE. System Requirements

Mark Chu-Carroll is a Google software engineer, and in a personal blog post this week explained the concept of one of Google’s programming models: MapReduce, which splits a task onto many computers on Google’s server farm (server farm, or single super computer, depending on how you look at it) to be quickly crunched.

A reader commented that MySQL isn’t “enterprise ready”, to which another reader wrote:

“I hate it when snobby DBAs or managers scoff at MySQL as if it isn’t ready to play with the big boys. Google called, they’d like to loan you a clue.”

As Zack reported, Sun is buying MySQL for ~$800M plus $200M in options. Interestingly, the MySQL acquisition represents 8% of Sun’s current market cap (~$13 Bil). While I’m happy for the MySQL team, my views on Sun’s OSS “strategy” are mixed at best.

Fleury and Rodrigues Separated at Birth?

Come on, you have to admit, the resemblance is uncanny. I’m obviously kidding. I’m much better looking. His sizable bank account and ability to keep a beat probably balances the score though

Google’s white-hot pace of releasing and tweaking products has one marketing pro asking the company to ease up on the accelerator.