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Konstatin Dmitriev's Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation's Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code. Subscribers can click below for a look at the project from this week's edition.

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Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density, always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive, worth-reading summary stating that "4 KiB logical sector support is broken in both the kernel and partitioners." As the subsequent discussion revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that we're not quite that badly prepared; click below (subscribers only) for details.

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Software patents have long been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community; patents are by far the biggest restraint on our ability to program our own computers. Those who worry about these things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from software companies with fading prospects. Apple's lawsuit against HTC shows that the real threat may come from a different direction. Click below (subscribers only) for a look at Apple's attack on Android and on Linux as a whole.

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One of the features expected with the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release is the Ubuntu One Music Store (UOMS). The UOMS is a mechanism by which Ubuntu users can purchase songs in the MP3 format, with some of the revenue going to support Canonical. These songs are evidently compressed at a relatively high bit rate and lack any sort of DRM or watermarks. Support for the UOMS has been integrated into the Rhythmbox music player, with support for other players expected in the future. Discussion of this new feature has been relatively subdued thus far, but developers elsewhere are beginning to take notice and ask some questions about the extent to which the UOMS should be supported.

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On Sunday at SCALE 8x, Inkscape developer Jon Cruz presented a talk entitled "Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You," putting the need for color management into real-world terms for the average Linux user, outlining current development work on the subject at the application and toolkit levels, and giving example color-managed workflows for print and web production. Color management is sometimes unfairly characterized as a topic of interest only to print shops and video editors, but as Cruz explained at the top of his talk, anyone who shares digital content wants it to look correct, and everyone who uses more than one device knows how tricky that can be. Click below, subscribers only, for a look at the talk from this week's edition.

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The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth. But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other "intellectual property" law. Every once in a while, a good status check on the legal dimension is healthy for the typical developer, and SCALE 8x offered just that in a series of talks.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full story from guest author Nathan Willis.

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There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Click below, subscribers only, for a report on the talk from WIOS.

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You are reading a standard-form news article, and when new information comes to light, the piece you're reading might just be referenced in a follow-up — but it won't be displayed in context or be easy to navigate. However, if Google's Living Stories experiment takes off following the release of its code, that won't always be the case. Subscribers can click below for a look at Living Stories from this week's edition.

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The 2.6.32.9 stable kernel update is in the review process as of this writing. There have often been requests for more information about stable updates, so, this time around, LWN decided to make a one-time try at providing that information. In the process, we've learned a few things - the task would have been easier if we'd not chosen a 93-patch update, for example. In any case, the job is done; click below (subscribers only) to see what's coming with 2.6.32.9.

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We now have almost five years of kernel development history in the git repository; this history can yield interesting information to those who look. In this article, your editor digs into the repository to look at our oldest code - how much of the kernel remains from the initial git commit in 2005? The answers can be surprising; click below (subscribers only) for the full story.

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Current news

LinuxCon Japan, formerly known as the Japan Linux Symposium, has announced its call for participation (CFP). This Linux Foundation sponsored conference will be held in Tokyo September 27-29. The CFP lists a number of topic areas that are of particular interest including desktop Linux, embedded and mobile Linux, Linux adoption, and so on; it closes on May 14. "LinuxCon Japan is the premiere Linux conference in Asia that brings together a unique blend of core developers, administrators, users, community managers and industry experts. It is designed not only to encourage collaboration but also to support future interaction between Japan and other Asia Pacific countries and the rest of the global Linux community. The conference includes presentations, tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, keynotes, sponsored mini-summits."

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The Linux Foundation has announced the program for the Collaboration Summit to be held April 14-16 in San Francisco. This is an invitation-only event, though invitations can still be requested. Highlights include a full-day session on Meego, the Linux kernel roundtable, keynotes by Josh Berkus, Dr. Daniel Frye, Jim Zemlin, and others, a cloud computing roundtable, and more. "The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only event where a true cross-section of leaders from the Linux developer, industry and end user communities meet face-to-face to tackle today’s most pressing issues facing Linux, including technical development, legal topics, ISV porting and end user requirements."

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Version 1.2 of PyPy - an alternative implementation of the Python interpreter - has been released. "This version 1.2 is a major milestone and it is the first release to ship a Just-in-Time compiler that is known to be faster than CPython (and unladen swallow) on some real-world applications (or the best benchmarks we could get for them). The main theme for the 1.2 release is speed." It's still not quite ready for production use, but it appears to be getting a lot closer.

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Debian has updated Egroupware (multiple vulnerabilities) and MoinMoin (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated nss (F12: TLS man-in-the-middle plaintext injection) and cups (fix for earlier denial of service fix).

Mandriva has updated ncpfs (multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated MoinMoin (multiple vulnerabilities).

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Over at opensource.com, OpenNMS's Tarus Balog looks at the process of starting an open source business. This article covers much of the same material as his recent SCALE 8x keynote. "You might think that I was motivated by some sort of idealistic love of open source software. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the time, I was still running a Windows desktop. I undertook the OpenNMS project because I believed one thing: in the area of network management, open source represents the best business solution."

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The Fedora board has, in response to ongoing discussions about updates to its releases (as covered in the March 11 Weekly Edition), adopted a "vision statement" on how Fedora releases should be maintained. "Stable releases should provide a consistent user experience throughout the lifecycle, and only fix bugs and security issues. Stable releases should not be used for tracking upstream version closely when this is likely to change the user experience beyond fixing bugs and security issues."

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Google has announced the release of its RE2 library under a BSDish license. "At Google, we use regular expressions as part of the interface to many external and internal systems, including Code Search, Sawzall, and Bigtable. Those systems process large amounts of data; exponential run time would be a serious problem. On a more practical note, these are multithreaded C++ programs with fixed-size stacks: the unbounded stack usage in typical regular expression implementations leads to stack overflows and server crashes. To solve both problems, we've built a new regular expression engine, called RE2, which is based on automata theory and guarantees that searches complete in linear time with respect to the size of the input and in a fixed amount of stack space." More information can be found on the RE2 project page.

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The H reports that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps, formerly Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, to the board of directors. "As a director, Phipps hopes to help the organisation change so that it becomes more member-oriented, more active in promoting open source in education, in policy development and possibly in organisational support for open source projects; "My goal as a Director will be to facilitate that change, a change that is already well under way following recent face to face discussions and the great work that Andrew Oliver and Danese Cooper have already put in"."

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This year's Embedded Linux Conference, which will be held in San Francisco April 12-14, has announced that its program is now available. The keynote speakers will be Greg Kroah-Hartman ("Android: a Case Study of an Embedded Linux Project") and Matt Asay ("Embedded in 2010: an End to the Entropy?") along with a whole slate of over 50 presentations, tutorials, and BoFs. "This is your chance to meet leading developers from the embedded Linux community, and learn about the latest changes in Linux. Also, you can talk to engineers working on real products at some of the largest CE companies in the world, describing how they solved real issues in their own development projects." Click below for the full announcement.

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Dave Phillips looks at arpeggiators for Linux. "An arpeggio is a musical technique whereby the notes of a chord are played in succession rather than all at once. The order of the chord notes in this succession may follow a strict set of rules or they may be played in purely random sequence. A device that acts upon a chord in this manner is known as an arpeggiator."

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