Announcements

Non-Commercial announcements

FFII.org domain hoster scared away by Nutzwerk

The ffii.org domain was shut down recently by its hosting provider. NoSoftwarePatents.com has more information on how ffii.org's hosting provider reacted to a threatening letter from Nutzwerk's lawyers. The ffii.org domain is still there and can be accessed by setting your nameserver to 212.72.72.97 and efforts are underway to transfer the domain, so it should be back in a few days. (Thanks to jrigg)

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The Freedom Toaster

One of the newest projects announced by the Shuttleworth Foundation is the Freedom Toaster. "This project began as a means of overcoming the difficulty in obtaining Linux and open source software due to the restrictive telecommunications environment in South Africa, where the easy downloading of large pieces of software is just not possible. The project essentially consists of a conveniently located `Bring 'n Burn' facility, where users bring their own blank discs and make copies of the open source software they require."

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International Petition Against Data Retention

European Digital Rights and XS4ALL Internet have sent out an international petition against data retention. "Internet users from all European countries are urged to sign the protest. The petition is aimed at the European Commission and the members of the European Parliament. The data retention proposal orders telephone companies and internet providers to retain the phone and e-mail records of their customers. The proposal to retain traffic data will reveal who has been calling and e-mailing whom, what websites people have visited and even where they were with their mobile phones."

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MozillaZine Enters Top 100 Folding@Home Teams (MozillaZine)

The MozillaZine team has achieved a Top 100 rating at the Folding@Home site. "Folding@Home is a project based on the distributed computing model, and aims to find a cure for diseases related to protein folding. Last year, MozillaZine forum members joined the project as a team. As reported earlier, the team had entered Top 200, back in April. We're pleased to announce that our team has now entered the ranks of Top 100 teams, and are mentioned on the Official Team Stats page."

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An Open Letter to the Community from MySQL Founders

MySQL Founders David Axmark and Michael "Monty" Widenius have sent an open letter to the open-source community. "This year, we are celebrating ten years of MySQL: the database, the company and the community. It's been hard (and interesting!) work for us -- but looking back, we should celebrate how far we've come. We created the best software we could for you, and you turned it into the most popular database of its kind. We want to thank you for this."

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OSDL Appoints Chief Financial Officer

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), has announced the appointment of Mike Temple to the position of Chief Financial Officer (CFO). "Temple brings more than 25 years experience in finance and operations to the OSDL executive team, including 15 years in CFO and general management roles and 10 years in public accounting practice."

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RISKS turns 20

RISKS 23.96 includes a note from Peter G. Neumann that this newsletter - still one of the best on the net - is now 20 years old. RISKS 1.01 was posted on August 1, 1985. It includes some familiar topics (computers and elections, for example), along with the resignation of David Parnas from the "strategic defense initiative" advisory panel. Congratulations to PGN for 20 years of excellence; he says he is not likely to stick with it for another 20, but it would be OK with us if he did.

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SeaMonkey Project Looking for Logo and Artwork (MozillaZine)

The SeaMonkey Project needs help from digital artists. "Robert Kaiser writes in with news that the SeaMonkey project is looking for a new logo and artwork for the community-driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite".

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Commercial announcements

Open Source Announcements

OSCON 2005 is in full swing, in Portland, Oregon. It seems to have inspired open source and Linux announcements from several companies.

• Novell, Inc. has announced comprehensive technical support for the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS).
• Novell and HP are offering HP BladeSystem and Proliant servers with SUSE Linux.
• Palamida has announced alliances with the Eclipse Foundation and SourceForge.net.
• SourceLabs has announced SourceLabs SASH Stack for Java, a new open source stack undergoing certification, and comprehensive support and maintenace services by subscription.

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Arcom offers Fedora on single board computer

Arcom has announced the availability of Fedora Linux on their APOLLO single board computer. "To accelerate your Linux development cycle, Arcom has introduced a ready-to-run Development Kit for the APOLLO – a Pentium M based single board computer designed for applications demanding long term product availability and high performance fanless operation. The APOLLO is built on power efficient Intel Centrino technology and is an industry standard EBX platform (8” x 5.75”)."

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Astaro Corporation Expands into Asia-Pacific

Astaro has announced its expansion into the Asian market. "The opening of this office in Hong Kong and the hiring of Schneersohn mark the next step for Astaro in its commitment to the region. The company expects to open additional local offices throughout the region as it makes available new Asian language products in the coming quarters."

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Coverity: Linux kernel quality improving

Coverity, the company formed out of the Stanford Checker work, has sent out a press release on the results of running its static analysis code on the 2.6.12 kernel. "Approximately 6 million lines of software were analyzed in the study. Defect density decreased slightly by 2.2 percent from 0.17 defects thousand lines of code in December of 2004 to 0.16 defects in July of 2005."

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Funk Software Announces Steel-belted Radius for Linux

Funk Software has announced the new Steel-Belted Radius, a RADIUS server. ""More and more customers want to move their network security applications to Linux," said Joe Ryan, vice president of Funk Software. "By making Steel-Belted Radius * a critical component of an enterprise's security strategy * available on Linux, we are giving customers the most flexibility in architecting and enforcing network access security across their entire enterprise.""

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Kaspersky Lab Launches Linux Security Initiative for U.S. Market

Kaspersky Lab has announced the release of three new versions of Kaspersky(R) Anti-Virus designed specifically to protect Linux and Unix email and file servers and workstations, running on the Linux, FreeBSD and Open BSD operating systems.

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Mozilla creates a for-profit corporation

The Mozilla Foundation has announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit company which will take over the development of Firefox and Thunderbird. Most Foundation employees will move over to the corporation. "As the Mozilla Foundation focuses on the project's governance, infrastructure and source code, the Mozilla Corporation will focus on developing and delivering end-user products, including marketing, sponsorships and a range of distribution-related activities. These activities are also expected to generate revenue, but the Mozilla Corporation only intends to pursue those that fit with the Mozilla project's focus on end-user experience and are consistent with the public benefit goals of the parent Mozilla Foundation."

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Openstream Contributes Speech Components to IBM-Apache Framework

Openstream, Inc. has announced the contribution of speech components for stock market applications to the Apache Foundation. "The RDC initiative, led by IBM and its partners, drives the speech and voice application business from its proprietary, vertical roots into the horizontal world of standards-based development. Speech components, called RDCs or Reusable Dialog Components, handle basic functions such as recognizing and responding to company names in brokerage and trading applications, dates or currencies, for example."

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Progeny and NCS Technologies partner on Linux appliance platforms

NCS Technologies and Progeny have announced a partnership for producing Linux-based appliance platforms. "NCS will be a source of high-quality, custom hardware platforms and manufacturing services for Progeny's server appliance customers. Independent software vendors (ISVs) working with NCS will be able to bundle their applications with a custom Linux operating system built and maintained by Progeny."

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SGI Announces Product and Customer Highlights for Fourth Quarter

SGI has announced the financial results for its recently completed the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2005. "SGI extended its family of Silicon Graphics Prism(TM) visualization systems with a new deskside model-starting under $8,500, thus answering the growing demand for more visualization capability in the hands of scientists and engineers using Linux to solve problems personal computers (PCs) can't handle. In addition, at National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in April, Silicon Graphics Prism was named one of the Top 10 products of NAB by Digital Cinema Report."

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Graphics Industry Demonstrates Widespread Adoption of OpenGL 2.0 API

Silicon Graphics and the OpenGL Architecture Review Board have announced industry adoption of the OpenGL(R) 2.0 API and the OpenGL Shading Language. "3Dlabs, ATI and NVIDIA, the top manufacturers of real-time 3D graphics cards, have all released products supporting the OpenGL 2.0 specification and the OpenGL Shading Language, ensuring its widespread availability."

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SpikeSource Introduces Fully Configured Made-to-Order Open Source Stacks

SpikeSource has announced the packaging of open-source components in its SpikeSource Core stack. "Developers will now be able to select from pre-built stacks for specific uses or define their own stack. Available at http://www.spikesource.com, the SpikeSource Core stack offers over 50 different components that can be combined to create fully configured and validated stacks, saving days or weeks otherwise spent integrating and configuring individual components and testing for overall interoperability."

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SugarCRM Releases Version 3.5 Beta of Sugar Suite

SugarCRM Inc. has announced the release of version 3.5 Beta of Sugar Suite, an open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. "Enhancements in Version 3.5 include a new plug-and-play installation utility for third-party add-on modules, cross-module reporting, HTML email support, simplified upgrade of customizations, improved Microsoft Outlook integration, and new user interface skins."

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New Books

Using Moodle - O'Reilly's Latest Release

O'Reilly has published the book Using Moodle by Jason Cole.

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Resources

IDS Load Balancing HOWTO

Jeremy M. Guthrie has published an IDS Load Balancing HOWTO. "I have created a new Howto for creating a multi-gigabit-per second IDS load balancer/distributor. Technically the limits are on buses and CPUS, so if you have enough bus speed and CPU... then you could use 10gbps cards. I am in the process of trying to get this posted to the Linux documentation project for the official online copy."

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Linux Gazette #117

Linux Gazette #117 is available. Topics this month include creating audio books from text, an introduction to CUPS, Python templating, Snort, and several others.

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Contests and Awards

FSF announces call for 2005 award nominations

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU project have announced that nominations are open for 2005 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. "This award is presented to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of software freedom (as defined in the Free Software Definition."

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Python Game Programming Challenge Registration opens

Registration for the Python Game Programming Challenge is open. "Registration is now open for the first Python Game Programming Challenge (also known as PyWeek). The challenge runs from Sunday August 28th to Sunday September 4th. That means there's only (checks website) 29 days to go before the challenge starts!"

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Upcoming Events

Big Nerd Ranch Announces PostgreSQL Bootcamp

Big Nerd Ranch will hold a PostgreSQL Bootcamp on September 26-30, 2005 near Atlanta, Georgia. "The PostgreSQL Bootcamp, led by instructor Chris Campbell, is an intensive, five-day, hands-on class designed to take students through the rigors of PostgreSQL, from the basics of installing and configuring PostgreSQL on a server to the more advanced aspects of performance and security."

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Free Linux Certification Offered at LinuxWorld San Francisco

IDG World Expo has announced that The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) will offer free Linux certification testing at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, taking place in August.

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KDE at San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo (KDE.News)

KDE will be present at the upcoming LinuxWorld Expo. "The K Desktop Environment project will again be present with a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo being held in San Francisco August 9 through 11. We'll be at booth #2038, upstairs, in the new Moscone building! We'll be demonstrating not only KDE 3.4, but also the upcoming KDE 3.5 and even maybe bits and pieces of what will become the revolutionary turning of the Gear KDE 4.0."

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Mozilla at OSCON 2005 and LinuxWorld Expo (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has announced participation by the Mozilla Foundation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. "At OSCON 2005, where the Mozilla Foundation will be exhibiting at booth 818, several leading Mozilla contributors will be giving talks or participating in sessions. Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker will answer questions in a keynote interview and also appear on the Women in Open Source panel."

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Wind River to Host Seminar Series on Linux Migration in Device Software

Wind River Systems, Inc. has announced a seminar series on migrating from legacy Real Time Operating System (RTOS) platforms to Linux. The seminars will take place on August 2, 2005 in Sunnyvale, CA, on August 16 in Alameda, CA, and on August 23 in Bellevue, WA.

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Open Source Desktop Workshops: San Diego (KDE.News)

KDE.News has an announcement for the first Open Source Desktop Workshop. The event will be held in San Diego, CA on October 13 and 14, 2005. "Open Source Desktop Workshops are affordable educational events that bring top-flight Open Source desktop developers together with those who are looking to gain the skills necessary to join them. With presenters from around North America speaking on a variety of practical topics this will be an exciting and worthwhile event." See this press release for more information.

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Events: August 4 - September 29, 2005

Date	Event	Location
August 4 - 5, 2005	O'Reilly Open Source Convention	(Oregon Convention Center)Portland, Oregon
August 4, 2005	Penguincon 2005	Israel
August 4 - 7, 2005	Linux 2005	(University of Wales)Swansea, UK
August 4 - 5, 2005	CIFS 2005 Conference and Plugfest	(Doubletree Hotel)San Jose, CA
August 4, 2005	2005 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival	Los Angeles, CA
August 4 - 5, 2005	USENIX Security Symposium	Baltimore, MD
August 4 - 8, 2005	Wikimania 2005	Frankfurt am Main, Germany
August 8 - 11, 2005	LinuxWorld Conference and Expo	(Moscone Center)San Francisco, CA
August 20, 2005	Free Audio and Video Event(FAVE)	(Trinity Community and Arts Centre)Bristol, UK
August 27 - September 4, 2005	aKademy 2005	(University of Málaga)Málaga Spain
August 31 - September 2, 2005	YAPC::EU::2005	(University of Minho)Braga, Portugal
September 1 - 2, 2005	Symposium on Security for Asia Network(SyScAN'05)	(The Dusit Thani Hotel)Bangkok, Thailand
September 1 - 4, 2005	GOTO10 ASP digital sound workshop	Rotterdam, the Netherlands
September 5 - 9, 2005	International Computer Music Conference(ICMC 2005)	Barcelona, Spain
September 14 - 16, 2005	php|works	(Holiday Inn Yorkdale)Toronto, Canada
September 16 - 18, 2005	ToorCon 7	(San Diego Convention Center)San Diego, CA
September 19 - 21, 2005	Plone Conference 2005	(Semper Depot, Lehargasse)Vienna, Austria
September 20 - 23, 2005	New Security Paradigms Workshop(NSPW)	(UCLA Conference Center)Lake Arrowhead, California
September 23 - 24, 2005	Sixth Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming(TFP 2005)	Tallinn, Estonia
September 26 - 29, 2005	Hack in the Box Security Conference(HITBSecConf2005)	Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
September 28 - 30, 2005	OpenOffice.org Conference 2005(OO.oCon)	Koper (Capodistria), Slovenia

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Web sites

Business Readiness Rating site online

The Business Readiness Ratings project is an initiative sponsored by Carnegie Mellon West, O'Reilly CodeZoo, SpikeSource, and Intel; its purpose is to collaboratively rate open source software projects to make it easier for businesses to choose between them. The project now has a site online at openbrr.org. There you'll find a white paper [PDF] describing the project and several example rating forms (in Excel format - one assumes that the open source spreadsheets have not been rated well).

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Finnish Mozilla.fi Community Site Opens (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has announced the opening of the Mozilla.fi (Finnish language) site. "Mozilla.fi is a community site done by the Finnish Mozilla localisation project, which is one of the many official Mozilla localisation projects. The site gathers Finnish Mozilla resources, which have until now been scattered around the webscape, into one comprehensive site."

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Audio and Video programs

LUGRadio episode out with Cairo interview (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop.org mentions the latest LUGradio episode. "One of the highlights of this weeks show is an interview with Carl Worth, maintainer of the Cairo project. Cairo is very important for GNOME as it allows us to greatly improve the look and feel of GNOME further to stay competitive with MacOSX and future Windows releases."

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