Summary: Barnes & Noble seeks to revitalize its Android-powered Nook tablet line over arch-rival Amazon's Kindle tablets by adding Google Play and full Android app support.

Barnes & Noble's Nook started out well as an early Android-powered e-reader/tablet. Since then, however, the Nook has fallen behind other low-priced Android tablets such as Google's Nexus 7 and arch-rival Amazon's  Kindle Fire. In an attempt to make itself more competitive, Barnes & Noble is incorporating Google Store and its full Android application support into a new software update for its top-of-the-line Nook HD and HD+ tablets.

Until now, the Nook had only a comparative small application store. With this 2.1 software update, Nook HD+ users will have access to the full Google Play Store software library of 700,000 apps. In addition, they'll be able to buy and play music from Google Music, videos, and even ebooks. Yes, that means you'll be able to buy apps, books, and movies from either the Nook Store or the Google Play Store.

Summary: Red Hat's Gluster open-source community has been all about its namesake, the GlusterFS, but now it's expanding to cover other open-source, software-defined storage technologies.

Red Hat announced on May 1 that its Gluster Community "has extended its charter from a single project to a multi-project open-source community for open software-defined storage."

Gluster, for those of you who haven't used it, is primarily about the Gluster file system (GlusterFS). Acquired by Red Hat in 2011, GlusterFS is an open-source network-attached storage (NAS) system that can be used both for virtual and cloud systems (PDF link). As such, it's positioned to be used to address big data problems.

Summary: Ready to start programming for Google Glass? The tools are out there. While only a handful of Google Glasses are out, Google quietly released its Android-based core kernel code.

Ready to start writing applications for Google Glass? You now can. On April 27, Google quietly released Google Glass's Android-based core kernel code.

The Google Glass release candidate code is available within a Linux tarball, an archived, compressed file format. Like any Linux-based operating system, the Google Glass Android kernel is licensed under the GPLv2.

Summary: Oracle's MySQL may be the most well-known open-source DBMS, but now MySQL's creators are together again with the merger of MariaDB and SkySQL.

When Oracle bought Sun, one of the reasons was to gain control of MySQL, the most popular open-source database management system (DBMS). It didn't work. Some of MySQL's founders and top programmers had already left to create the MySQL fork, MariaDB, while others started SkySQL, a MySQL and MariaDB support company. Now, the old core MySQL developers have rejoined forces.

On April 23, SkySQL announced that it had signed a merger agreement with Monty Program Ab, MariaDB's parent company. The aim of this new company, which will go under the name SkySQL, is to develop MariaDB into a truly interoperable, "NewSQL" open-source database in collaboration with its customers, partners and the community. The community side will continue as the MariaDB Foundation.

Summary: Ubuntu Touch, the version of the Linux operating system for smartphones and tablets, is now available.

How does Ubuntu Touch, the version of Ubuntu Linux, compare to Android? Well, you can finally find out for yourself. The first official, public bootable Ubuntu Touch images are now available.

Nicholas Skaggs, a Canonical software engineer and quality assurance community co-ordinator, wrote, "I'm happy to announce the Ubuntu touch images are now available for testing on the isotracker. And further, the images are now Raring based! [That is to say, they're based on the soon to be released Ubuntu 13.04 codebase]  As such, the Ubuntu Touch team is asking for folks to try out the new images on their devices and ensure there are no regressions or other issues."

San Francisco: We all know open source has become an important tool in pure software development. What's now becoming clear according to a Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners open-source survey that was released on April 17th, and events at the Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit, is that open source is now helping improve enterprise networking, smart-cars, and academia.

For example, at the Summit, the simple fact that The Linux Foundation was successful in getting such mortal business enemies as Big Switch, Cisco, and Juniper on the same page in the OpenDaylight Project to open-source software defined networking (SDN) is amazing. It's not just lip-service to finding a common way to implement SDN's core OpenFlow protocol. The members are putting in tens of millions of dollars in resources for code that will be openly shared with everyone — including non-members.

Why are they doing this? As executive director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin said, OpenDaylight members can share on a “level playing field where no single actor can dominate the process. They understand that they can gain more by working together in an open-source way with open-source governance while still competing in the marketplace."

Summary: You read that right: Not the year of the Linux desktop, the year of the Linux car. Major automotive companies are investing in making Linux their cars' operating system of choice.

San Francisco: When you think about Linux, you probably think about servers, desktops, Android smartphones and tablets. What you almost certainly don't think about is cars, but Linux is already running under the hood of many cars and it may play a much larger role soon.

That was the message Matt Jones brought to the Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit. Jones is a senior technical specialist for Jaguar Land Rover infotainment systems and VP of the non-profit GENIVI Alliance, an automotive industry group driving adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open-source development platform.

Summary: Move over Raspberry Pi, here comes Adapteva's Parallella, a low-cost parallel chip board for Linux supercomputing.

San Francisco: Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit that they've built their first Parallella  parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing and they'll be sending them to their  6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer.

Linux has long been the number one supercomputer operating system. But, while you could build your own Linux supercomputer using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, it wouldn't be terribly fast. You needed hardware that could support massively parallel computing--the cornerstone of modern supercomputing. 

Summary: Xen, Citrix's popular open-source hypervisor, is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with the backing of such major technology powers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Intel.

San Francisco, CA: In a surprising move, the Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to Linux, announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit that the Xen Project, the open-source hypervisor, is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

Xen, which is now 10-years old, is an open source virtualization platform licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Citrix has been Xen's commercial backer since 2007. However, as the project experiences contributions from an increasingly diverse group of companies, Xen is looking to The Linux Foundation to be a neutral forum for providing guidance and facilitating a collaborative network. This new project is going by the old name: Xen Project.