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Linus Torvalds rarely makes appearances at conferences, and it's even less common for him to get up in front of the crowd and speak. He made an exception for LinuxCon Brazil, though, where he and Andrew Morton appeared in a question and answer session led by Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin. The resulting conversation covered many aspects of kernel development, its processes, and its history. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from São Paulo.

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Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model. Subscribers can click below for the full article from this week's Development page.

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Much attention goes toward mainline kernel releases, but relatively few users are actually running those kernels. Instead, they run kernels provided by their distributors, and those kernels, in turn, are based off the stable kernel series. The practice of releasing stable kernels has been going for well over five years now, so perhaps it's time to look back at how it has been going. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

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Systemd, an alternative to Upstart or System V init, has made big strides since it was announced at the end of April. It has been packaged for Fedora and openSUSE, and for users of Fedora Rawhide, it gets installed as the default. There are still bugs to be shaken out, of course, and that work is proceeding, especially in the context of Rawhide. The big question is whether Fedora makes the leap to use systemd as the init system for Fedora 14. Click below, subscribers only, for an update on systemd's progress from this week's edition.

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Your editor was recently amused to encounter this ZDNet article on "Android's dirty little secret." According to that article, the openness of Android has led to an increase in the control held by handset manufacturers and wireless carriers and the fragmentation of the platform. The Open Handset Alliance is in a "shambles," and Android phones have undone all the gains won by that great standard bearer for openness and freedom - the iPhone. One might easily conclude that Android is just business as usual for the mobile telephony industry, but there are a few things worth contemplating here. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

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A longstanding bug in the Linux kernel—quite possibly since the first 2.6 release in 2003—has been fixed by a recent patch, but the nearly two-month delay between the report and the fix is raising some eyebrows. It is a local privilege escalation flaw that can be triggered by malicious X clients forcing the server to overrun its stack. Click below, subscribers only, for a look at the bug from this week's Security page.

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The second LinuxCon event was held in Boston on August 10-12, preceded by a number of minisummits. This conference featured a wide variety of speakers and an enthusiastic audience which filled most sessions to the point of overflowing. LinuxCon has clearly become the dominant North American Linux conference. What follows are notes taken by your editor from a number of the more interesting presentations; click below (subscribers only) to read about talks by Wim Coekaerts, Amanda Brock, Karen Sandler, and Stormy Peters.

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Many electrons have been expended in the discussion of Oracle's recently-filed lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements in the Android platform. Your editor is somewhat reluctant to contribute to the flood; at this point, the amount of real information which is available is minimal while the amount of speculation is high. This will be an important case, though; the world will be watching to see how it turns out. So here are a few thoughts to add to the pile.

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A common event at conferences is a panel of developers with reporters listening from the audience; your editor moderated just this kind of panel at LinuxCon 2010. This time around, though, we also saw the tables turned: there was a panel of journalists facing the developers that they write about. The panelists were Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, Jason Brooks, Sean Michael Kerner, Ryan Paul, and Steven Vaughan-Nichols; it was an interesting opportunity to see how things look from the other side of the keyboard. Subscribers can click below for the report from LinuxCon.

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The second day of the 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit was held on August 9 in Boston. The event featured a number of technical discussions covering writeback issues, solid-state storage devices, bandwidth controllers, memory management for virtualized guests, and more. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from the closing day of this meeting.

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Current news

On his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. "Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either." If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.

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Issue 21 of the GNOME Journal is out; topics covered include simple real-time games, Grilo, and an interview with Bradley Kuhn.

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CentOS has updated C5: httpd (multiple vulnerabilities) and C5: kernel (privilege escalation).

Debian has updated wireshark (arbitrary code execution).

Fedora has updated socat (F13, F12: arbitrary code execution).

Mandriva has updated libgdiplus (arbitrary code execution), perl-libwww-perl (unexpected download filename), and openssl (denial of service).

openSUSE has updated acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities) and acroread (multiple vulnerabilities).

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On her blog, Máirín Duffy describes four archetypes of Fedora users (Caroline Casual-User, Pamela Packager, Connie Community, and Nancy Ninja) and how they relate to updates of the distribution. Fedora has been discussing its update policy for a bit and Duffy uses the user stories to present her thoughts on how to proceed. "Pamela wants updates to be constant throughout a release, no holds barred — she wants the latest Gimp and she wants it yesterday. Caroline just wants her computer to work — "please don't change a thing — it worked yesterday — if it breaks before my presentation I'm screwed!" Can both their needs be met? I think so! But it’s easy to completely miss where interests and needs can both be met when the language is so easily interpreted to mean the problem is untenable."

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The Debian Project has put up a brief notice on the passing of longtime contributor Frans Pop. "Frans was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian Listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator."

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The first release candidate for PostgreSQL 9.0 is available for testing. "No changes in commands, interfaces or APIs are expected between this release candidate and the final version. Applications which will deploy on 9.0 can and should test against 9.0rc1. Depending on bug reports, there may or may not be more release candidates before the final release."

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KDE has updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1. "This release will make 4.5 users life more pleasant by adding a number of important bugfixes, bringing more stability and better functionality to the Plasma Desktop, and many applications and utilities."

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Debian has updated openssl (denial of service).

Fedora has updated bogofilter (F13, F12: denial of service) and php-pear-cas (F13, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated libhx (arbitrary code execution).

Ubuntu has updated bogofilter (denial of service) and libwww-perl (unexpected download filename).

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Over at ComputerWorld UK, Simon Phipps says there is nothing to celebrate in the recent announcement [PDF] that MPEG-LA will not charge royalties on "web uses" of the H.264 codec for the remaining life of the patents it administers. "First, the H.264-format video needs to be created - but that isn't free under this move. Then it needs to be served up for streaming - but that isn't free under this move. There then needs to be support for decoding it in your browser - but adding that isn't free under this move. Finally it needs to be displayed on your screen. [...] The only part of this sequence being left untaxed is the final one. Importantly, they are not offering to leave the addition of support for H.264 decoding in your browser untaxed. In particular, this means the Mozilla Foundation would have to pay to include the technology in Firefox." He also posits that MPEG-LA may try to join forces with Oracle and Paul Allen's Interval Research to create a three-way patent attack on Google—this time against WebM.

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The Chromium blog reports on some developments in graphics handling in the free Google Chrome-based browser. The intent is to speed up graphics rendering by taking advantage of the GPU. "At its core, this graphics work relies on a new process (yes, another one) called the GPU process. The GPU process accepts graphics commands from the renderer process and pushes them to OpenGL or Direct3D (via ANGLE). Normally, renderer processes wouldn’t be able to access these APIs, so the GPU process runs in a modified sandbox. Creating a specialized process like this allows Chromium’s sandbox to continue to contain as much as possbile: the renderer process is still unable to access the system’s graphics APIs, and the GPU process contains less logic."

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