Non-Commercial announcements
The EFF
reports that
the draft WIPO treaty (covered in
the May 4 LWN Weekly Edition)
no longer grants 50-year copyright protection to webcasters. "
So
webcasting is out, but the question is for how long? The U.S., which
proposed its inclusion, was not happy about the outcome. It said it was
concerned with the 'missed opportunity' to provide protection for new
entities, but said that it would reluctantly be prepared to accept the
two-track approach -- on the condition that if the WIPO General Assembly
did not convene a Diplomatic Conference dealing with 'traditional
broadcasting' when it meets in September, any future discussions on a
Broadcasting Treaty would include protection for new Internet
entities." The DMCA-like DRM provisions are, presumably, still
present in the draft.
Comments (5 posted)
KDE e.V., a registered non-profit organization that represents the K
Desktop Environment in legal and financial matters, and the Free Software
Foundation Europe (FSFE) have announced their associate status, working
together for the promotion and protection of Free Software on users'
desktops in Europe and worldwide.
Full Story (comments: none)
The CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) project
has announced
its participation in the Google Summer of Code.
"
Qualifying students will be paid $4500 to work on any of the tasks on the CUPS roadmap page or a cool new idea of their own."
Comments (none posted)
OpenOffice.org has announced its participation in the
Google Summer of Code.
"
OpenOffice.org is proud to participate in the Summer of Code
initiative sponsored by Google, and you are invited to join in the
fun.... Last year's SoC was hailed by both students and mentors as a
success, and we hope this year's will be even better."
Full Story (comments: none)
Sun Microsystems, Inc. has
announced the unanimous approval of the Java EE 5 spec by the
Java EE/SE Executive Committee.
"
With more than 30 licensees, Java EE is the premier platform for Java
and Web services deployment. Java EE 5, described by JCP Java Specification
Request (JSR) 244, includes innovations provided by more than 30 community
experts and completed public review in August 2005. In all, 23 individual
JSRs focusing on support for the latest web services and service-oriented
architecture (SOA) technologies, a major revamp to the programming model,
and simplified web application creation make up the Java EE 5
specification."
Comments (3 posted)
Commercial announcements
Novell, Inc. has
announced the worldwide availability of its Open Workgroup Suite.
"
Novell Open Workgroup Suite is now available
worldwide, giving customers an open, low-cost alternative to the
Windows-centric solution many perceive as their only option. The first
workgroup suite for the open enterprise that provides organizations with a
flexible and cost-effective solution based on proven, standards-based
software, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite includes server and desktop
components with powerful management tools, collaboration capabilities and
the most advanced open source office products in the market."
Comments (none posted)
OpenLogic, Inc. has announced the first program to provide consolidated,
commercial-grade support across a wide range of open source products by
tapping the open source development community for enterprise support.
Through the OpenLogic Expert Community, "
OpenLogic will pay qualified
experts within the open source development community to provide in-depth
support for open source products."
Full Story (comments: none)
Qlusters and Emu Software have announced the Open Management Consortium
(OMC). "
"The Consortium will promote the benefits offered by open
source and open standard technologies and will provide a forum for product
development collaboration among open source IT management projects. The
founding members of the OMC include Nagios (sponsored by Ayamon),
NetDirector (sponsored by Emu Software), openQRM (sponsored by Qlusters),
openSIMS (sponsored by Symbiot), the Webmin project and the Zenoss project
(sponsored by Zenoss, Inc.)."
Full Story (comments: none)
Ranch Networks has announced a Redundancy Solution for the Asterisk
open-source telephony platform.
"
Ranch Networks, the first IP telephony
network appliance provider to integrate security and bandwidth control for
IP-based applications, today introduced 1+1 High Availability (HA) to its RN
series of appliances. The 1+1 HA feature will provide users with reliable,
redundant and uninterrupted VoIP service between any two Asterisk servers,
even when the servers are not on the same network."
Full Story (comments: none)
New Books
PC Publishing has published the book
Ableton Live 5 Tips and Tricks
by Martin Delaney.
"
Ableton Live is the cross-platform software that's rocked the music
world--gathering ardent fans in a way usually associated with performers
rather than software."
Full Story (comments: 1)
Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book
"Enterprise Integration with Ruby" by Maik Schmidt.
Full Story (comments: none)
O'Reilly has published the book
Learning UML 2.0
by Russ Miles and Kim Hamilton.
Full Story (comments: none)
Pearson has published the book
Linux Troubleshooting for System Administrators and Power Users by James Kirkland,
David Carmichael, Christopher Tinker and Gregory Tinker.
Full Story (comments: none)
O'Reilly has published the book
Programming PHP, Second Edition by Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe, and Peter MacIntyre.
Full Story (comments: none)
O'Reilly has published the book
Ubuntu Hacks: Rough Cuts Version
by Kyle Rankin, Jonathan Oxer, and Bill Childers.
Full Story (comments: none)
Prentice Hall has published the book
UNIX to Linux Porting: A Comprehensive Reference by Alfredo Mendoza, Chakarat Skawratananond and Artis Walker.
Full Story (comments: none)
Resources
Issue #1 of the Campware newsletter is available.
Campware is an open-source
platform for independent news media organizations in emerging democracies,
"
Welcome to the first issue of the Campware newsletter! We hope to
bring you this kind of updates on a quarterly basis to let you know
what we've been up to."
Full Story (comments: none)
EasyLinuxCDs.Com provides a wide range of Linux Distributions and Training
materials to the Linux community. Now, in the true spirit of sharing,
EasyLinuxCDs.com has widened the spectrum of free services to include
games, wallpapers, how-to articles and more.
Full Story (comments: none)
The May 10, 2006 edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe
newsletter has been published.
Full Story (comments: none)
Contests and Awards
The winners of the second
PyWeek
game programming challenge have been announced. Winners include
Nelly's Rooftop Garden
and
Trip on the Funny Boat.
Comments (none posted)
Education and Certification
The Linux Professional Institute will be holding certification
testing at LinuxWorld in Johannesburg, South Africa on May 18, 2006.
Full Story (comments: none)
TimeSys will hold new Technical Webinars for Embedded Linux on
May 11, 16 and 23, 2006.
"
TimeSys offers its services through LinuxLink subscriptions, which
include a number of cross-development tools that simplify embedded
development. Each session will explore cross-compilation and build
challenges, highlight TimeSys tools for addressing these challenges,
and enable live interaction with technical experts from TimeSys."
Full Story (comments: none)
Event Reports
Ciaran O'Riordan has posted
a
transcript of Richard Stallman's GPLv3 talk at Porto Alegre last
month. "
So IBM has patent licences for loads of things that they
don't know. So the result is that they could have a patent license that
makes them safe and they don't know it. So, we said that it's not fair to
put them in a worse position than you would be in just because they have a
blanket cross-licence and somebody else is explicitly negotiating a
licence, so we said, alright, it will only apply if you knowingly rely on a
patent licence. So if IBM has a patent licence as part of a blanket
cross-licence and doesn't know, then this doesn't apply to them, but if
they find out that this problem is happening and they have a patent
licence, then they have to do something. IBM doesn't seem to like this very
much."
Comments (11 posted)
Few of us will be able to attend the second Desktop Architects Meeting,
happening May 8 and 9 in Mainz, Germany. We all can, however,
check out
the
slides from the presentations which will be made there. As of this
writing, slides from a number of presenters, representing distributors,
applications, desktop projects, and others, have been posted.
Comments (none posted)
Upcoming Events
Sun Microsystems, Inc. has
announced the Third Annual NetBeans Day. The event will take place
at the 2006 JavaOne Conference on May 15, 2006 in San Francisco, CA.
"
The
"Enterprise and Beyond" track will focus on development the upcoming Java
EE 5 platform, while the "Client Application Development" track will
highlight visual development of rich clients using the Project Matisse
visual development tool and the Java SE platform. Featured guests will
include Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's newly named Chief Executive Officer, and
James Gosling, the father of Java."
Comments (none posted)
| Date | Event | Location |
| May 11 - 18, 2006 | LinuxWorld on Tour
Conference and Expo 2006(LOT2006) | Montreal Ottawa Calgary Vancouver |
| May 12 - 13, 2006 | BSDCan
2006 | (University of Ottawa)Ottawa Canada |
| May 13, 2006 | DebianDay | Oaxtepec, Mexico |
| May 14 - 22, 2006 | DebConf 6 | Oaxtepec,
Mexico |
| May 16 - 19, 2006 | 2006 JavaOne
Conference | (Moscone Center)San Francisco, CA |
| May 26 - 27, 2006 | FreedomHEC | Seattle, WA |
| May 30 - June 3, 2006 | 2006 USENIX Annual Technical
Conference | (Boston Marriott Copley Place)Boston, MA |
| June 13 - 14, 2006 | Where 2.0
Conference | (Fairmont Hotel San Jose)San Jose, CA |
| June 13 - 14, 2006 | Gartner Open Source
Summit 2006 | (Palau de Congressos de Catalunya)Barcelona, Spain |
| June 14 - 16, 2006 | New York PHP Conference and
Expo 2006 | (New Yorker Hotel)New York, NY |
| June 16 - 18, 2006 | Recon
2006 | (Plaza Hotel Centre-Ville)Montreal, Canada |
| June 18 - 23, 2006 | Ubuntu Developer
Summit | Charles de Gaulle, Paris, France |
| June 24 - 25, 2006 | Free and Open
Source Conference(FrOSCon) | (St. Augustin)Bonn, Germany |
| June 24 - 30, 2006 | 2006 GNOME Users and Developers
European Conference(GUADEC) | Catalonia, Spain |
| June 24 - 25, 2006 | PHP
Vikinger | Skien, Norway |
| June 27 - 29, 2006 | Corporate Channel and Computing
Expo(C3) | (Jacob K. Javits Convention Center)New York, NY |
| June 28 - 30, 2006 | GCC and GNU Toolchain
Developers' Summit | (Ottawa Congress Centre)Ottawa, Canada |
| June 30 - July 1, 2006 | WebTech
2006 | (Kempinski Hotel Zografski)Sofia, Bulgaria |
| July 3 - 4, 2006 | 3rd European Lisp
Workshop | Nantes, France |
Comments (none posted)
Web sites
KDE.News
reports
on the latest changes to
KDE-Artists.org.
"
KDE-Artists.org is back up sporting a brand new look and feel. We have created a much more community centric site where those interested can submit news, tutorials, links and more. There is also a new feature we call Studios. This is a new twist on blogging that is completely focused on the creation of art and showcasing the process of creation. Artists who are interested will be able to share their artwork with others and talk about how they created it, and what influences them in their creative process."
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Forrest Cook