6. H1-B backers seek White House help for foreign students : Supporters of changes in H-1B visas took their pleas to the Bush administration after not making progress with Congress. They're asking for a time extension so that foreign graduates of U.S. universities can remain in the country on student visas for 29 months instead of the year now allowed. The proposal wouldn't boost the government cap on H-1B visas issued every year to skilled non-U.S. workers, but it would give students extra time to earn the degrees needed to qualify for such visas.

7. Universities build open-source enterprise applications : A group of U.S. universities is building big, mission-critical enterprise applications that have been the territory of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. And they're using an open-source software model for their work. A financial management application, Kuali Financial System, is the first application they've produced, and it's available under a variant of the Apache 2.0 license. First deployment was to Strathmore University, a small school in Nairobi, Kenya, which estimates that it cut deployment costs in half by going with the open-source software over commercial software.

8. Analyst: Money will fuel mobile spying programs : Financial gain from selling spying tools is expected to lure more sophisticated programmers to that dark side, according to Jamo Niemela, a senior antivirus researcher at F-Secure in Finland. He spoke at the Black Hat conference in Amsterdam this week, predicting that the path for spying programs for mobile phones will follow that of malware and PCs. Hackers sell tools that are easy to use to less-savvy hackers instead of doing the PC hacking work themselves. Researchers are led to believe from anecdotal evidence that companies are trying to cope with mobile spyware on phones. "There have been certain cases of corporate customers asking very detailed questions about spy tools and not mentioning why they need the information," Niemela said.

9. Sun ships servers open to attack : Whoops! Sun shipped servers in the Sparc Enterprise T5120 and T5220 lines with unsafe configurations in disk images that could enable remote attackers to take over the servers. The company issued a security alert Feb. 12, but it wasn't picked up by third-party security vendors until this week. The Sun advisory told customers how to figure out if they had one of the buggy servers and what to do to lock down affected machines, but didn't offer much in the way of details beyond that.

10. Red Hat: Open source benefits from U.S. unpopularity : Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference held in San Francisco this week, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst claimed that the negative opinion of the U.S. found abroad has actually been a boost to open-source companies. "I never thought I would say this but actually, being very unpopular in the world, as frankly the U.S. is these days, is a huge benefit to open source," Whitehurst said. Outside the United States, open source is seen from a public policy perspective as a fundamental good, and people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S. in "intellectual property taxes," so they turn to open-source software in order to operate without the shackles of U.S. intellectual property law.

[ Check out InfoWorld's open-source roundtable discussion ]