Today’s Le Monde Informatique reports that the Mozilla Foundation, the organisation behind Firefox, is going to include advertising in the browser with sponsored links as a means of increasing the income of the Foundation, which is currently heavily dependent on funding from Google.

According to the Le Monde Informatique, the inclusion of advertising in the Firefox browser represents a small revolution for the Mozilla Foundation. In concrete terms, Firefox will display sponsored links in some of the 9 tiles the user sees when a new browser tab is opened, Darren Herman, Mozilla’s Service Content Vice-President, explains in a blog post. The other tiles will continue to show thumbnails frequently or recently visited sites.

When the browser is first used, these tiles are blank and Mozilla’s Directory Tiles project is planning to include pre-packaged content with them. Herman makes reassuring noises about this change, stating: “Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy.”

Limiting dependency on Google

Including advertising in Firefox allegedly meets Mozilla need to diversify its sources of revenue, according to a Foundation spokesman. “The majority of Mozilla’s income comes for a single search partner and we would like to increase our resources to cope with changes on the web,” he explained. The Service Content Division has therefore worked on finding additional income sources.

He added that Mozilla’s relationship on search with Google was still beneficial for both parties. Google provides the majority of Mozilla’s revenues and Google is the default search engine in Firefox.

As a loyal Firefox user who doesn’t like advertising, I view these changes with concern and will be switching to either the Opera or Chromium browser after Mozilla implements this change.

ReactOS is an open source operating system based on Windows NT architecture with a Win32 subsystem, which is striving to achieve full compatibility with Windows XP (NT 5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2) up to hardware driver level. The developers describe the new 0.3.16 version as “the prelude to many new features which will considerably improve user-friendliness in future”. By way of an example, these new features also include support for themes.

The most significant new technical feature is the completion of a new version of the Client/Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS), an important part of the Win32 subsystem. Thanks to a new driver for the RTL8139 network chip, there is no longer any need to emulate a NE2000 network chip when running under current Qemu versions.

The developers are currently seeking to bring forward a commercial spin-off with a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter (posts passim). However, to date only some $25,000 of the $120,000 being sought has been pledged.

Blue-Mind, the French open source collaborative messaging solution, has been adopted for French universities and other associated establishments, including scientific and technical public institutions, Le Monde Informatique reports today.

The Ministry for Higher Education and Research has signed a four-year framework agreement with French software supplier Blue-Mind. Its collaborative open source messenging solution is therefore now available with a specific pricing structure to all French universities, elite schools (the so-called ‘grandes écoles‘), scientific and technical public institutions such as the CNRS, INSERM, INRA, INRIA, etc. and public sector research and computing centres.

The Blue-Mind offering is positioned as a competitor to Google Apps as regards functionality. Its features include messenging/email, contact management, calendars, etc. for all types of devices, including mobiles.

German IT news website Heise writes that the developers of ReactOS, the free and open source Windows clone, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to advance the development of their Windows-compatible operating system. The campaign’s target is to collect $120,000 for the development of a commercial version of ReactOS called “Thorium Core”. The developers state that everything which is developed in Thorium will also be fed back into ReactOS. The Kickstarter campaign will run until 21st February and had realised over $18,000 at the time of writing.

The ReactOS project has the aim of building an open source operating system based on Windows NT architecture with a Win32 sub-system. The current development aim is compatibility with Windows NT 5.2, so that 32 bit hardware drivers and applications for Windows XP (NT 5.1) and Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2) can be used. Finally, ReactOS should provide a leaner and more flexible environment for Windows applications than that provided by current versions of Windows. Nevertheless, the developers warn that the most recent version of ReactOS – 0.3.15 – is still an alpha version and advise against using it for day-to-day work.