Announcements

Non-Commercial announcements

Australia's copyright "reform"

Here is a press release from Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock on the changes in Australia's copyright law to "make our laws fairer for consumers." Check out the FAQ at the end. "For the first time you will be able to record most television or radio program [sic] at home to enjoy at a later time. This will allow you to watch or listen to a program as it was made available to the public at the time of the original broadcast... The recording must be deleted after one use. It will not be possible to use the recording over and over again." Loading a digital music player becomes legal, but making a backup copy of a CD is not. (Seen on BoingBoing).

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Creative launches patent suit against Apple

Creative has sent out a press release proclaiming its new patent lawsuit against Apple. It seems that Creative has a patent describing an interface for audio players. From the patent claims: "...the method comprising: selecting a category in the first display screen of the portable media player; displaying the subcategories belonging to the selected category in a listing presented in the second display screen; selecting a subcategory in the second display screen; displaying the items belonging to the selected subcategory in a listing presented in the third display screen; and accessing at least one track based on a selection made in one of the display screens." This would appear to cover any sort of directory-based browser that happened to work with media "tracks."

Comments (7 posted)

EFF: Record Labels Sue XM Radio

Here's an EFF dispatch on today's episode of the copyright wars: the RIAA's newly-filed lawsuit against XM radio, which is said to be guilty of the heinous crimes of (1) buffering radio streams in memory, and (2) allowing subscribers to record those streams. "If the RIAA succeeds this time, innovators could face liability whenever a court decides they didn't do 'enough' to prevent infringement. The value of 'enough,' of course, will not be revealed to you until after you spend millions in legal fees and risk losing your company to ruinous statutory damages."

A little off topic, but worth reading, is this EFF release on its wiretapping suit against ATT. The EFF has just beaten down ATT's attempt to close a hearing on the sealing of documents.

Comments (7 posted)

Fujitsu Veteran to Lead OSDL Japan

Open Source Development Labs has announced the appointment of Takashi Kunai as its new director of Japan. "Kunai brings more than 30 years of software development and business experience to his new role at OSDL where he will lead the Labs' key initiatives in the region. Specific emphasis will be given to bridging communications among vendors, the open source community and the Japanese customers. Additionally, Kunai will focus on helping to drive adoption of the Linux operating system on enterprise servers and mobile devices."

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Supreme Court makes patent injunctions harder

As reported on the Right-To-Create site, the U.S. Supreme Court has just handed down a (unanimous) opinion making it harder (though not impossible) for patent owners to get injunctions shutting down use of allegedly infringing technology. "This is a big deal, as it increases your right to create. It diminishes the paper inventor's monopoly over basic ideas, and gives you more freedom to invent and market your innovations without the fear that unscrupulous individuals will be able to thwart it all by gaming the legal system."

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Commercial announcements

Design and simulation switch to Linux (Electronicstalk.com)

Electronicstalk.com covers the release of new electronic design software for Linux. "Ansoft Corporation has released Nexxim v3 and Ansoft Designer v3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 and Sun Solaris 8 and 9 operating systems. Nexxim is the company's circuit simulation software for high-performance IC design and signal-integrity analysis. Ansoft Designer provides an integrated schematic and design management front-end for complex analogue, RF and mixed-signal applications."

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Coridan to release MantaRay 2.0 Under the Mozilla Public License

Coridan Inc has announced its plans to release MantaRay 2.0, an application messaging solution, under the Mozilla Public License. "MantaRay is an innovative open-source application messaging solution designed to address the continuously changing structure of today's IT environments. MantaRay uses a unique distributed architecture that has helped create a product which is significantly faster and more efficient than traditional systems. Being lightweight, operating systems independent and highly scalable, MantaRay is ideal for heterogeneous, distributed, high-traffic environments, helping IT organizations dramatically reduce hardware and operational costs."

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KDE Desktop Hosting Service (KDE.News)

KDE.News looks at a new desktop hosting service. "InQub Ltd offers personal remote KDE desktops on Kubuntu using NoMachine's NX technology for bandwidth savings and connection encryption for a small monthly charge. Each account is comes with 1 GB of home directory storage and is customisable by the respective user."

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OpenClovis announces open-source telecom platform

OpenClovis, Inc. has announced the OpenClovis Software Project. "OpenClovis, Inc. (previously Clovis Solutions, Inc.) today announced it has launched a new open source project that aims to transform the telecommunications industry. The company is hosting the "OpenClovis Software Project" and has contributed to open source, under the GNU Public License (GPL), more than 500,000 lines of code developed over three years by software experts with experience from Alcatel, AT&T, Bellcore, CIENA, Cisco Systems, Lucent and Nortel."

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QLogic to Support SUSE Linux Enterprise 10

QLogic has announced plans to support SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. "QLogic Corp., the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, today announced its support of the upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform from Novell and the virtualization technologies that will be included in this newest distribution of the operating system (OS)."

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Sun Advances Open Source Strategy at JavaOne

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the release of an open-source Service Oriented Architecture platform. "Sun planned open source contributions include the award-winning Sun Java Studio Creator, market-leading Sun Java System Portal Server, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) Engine from the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS) and the NetBeans Enterprise Pack, as well as Sun's Java Message System (JMS)-based message queue and Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT)."

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Sun Announces Additional Support and Resources for AJAX Development

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced new AJAX online resources. "Sun Microsystems, Inc., the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today furthered its support for the AJAX community by launching two new comprehensive online resources for AJAX application development as well as Project jMaki, an open source JavaScript Wrapper Framework for the Java Platform. "

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BEA Implements Finalized EJB3.0 Java Persistence APIs

BEA Systems, Inc. has announced their Kodo 4.0 product. "BEA Systems, Inc. , a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, is furthering its commitment to JavaEE 5 and Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB3) by announcing the general availability of Kodo 4.0 with EJB3 and a technology preview of BEA WebLogic Server. The technology preview is designed to feature a full implementation of the recently finalized EJB3 specification."

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TimeSys Introduces LinuxLink Subscriptions for MIPS32 34K

TimeSys has announced the availability of LinuxLink Subscriptions for the MIPS32 34K Core Family. "LinuxLink subscriptions for the MIPS32 34K family are the most recent offerings from LinuxLink by TimeSys. Initial support for the 34K cores is based on the 2.6.15 kernel but with the recent availability of 2.6.16 support with LinuxLink 2nd Edition, an update is planned this month."

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New Books

No Starch Press releases "Nagios: System and Network Monitoring"

No Starch Press has published the book Nagios: System and Network Monitoring by Wolfgang Barth.

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Perl Hacks - O'Reilly's Latest Release

O'Reilly has published the book Perl Hacks by chromatic with Damian Conway and Curtis "Ovid" Poe.

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Resources

High Assurance and Free-Libre / Open Source Software

David A. Wheeler presents a new essay entitled High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS). "This paper discusses some relationships between high assurance software (for security or safety) and free-libre / open source software (FLOSS). In particular, it shows that many tools for developing high assurance software have FLOSS licenses, by identifying FLOSS tools for software configuration management, testing, formal methods, analysis implementation, and code generation. However, while high assurance components are rare, FLOSS high assurance components are even rarer. This is in contrast with medium assurance, where there are a vast number of FLOSS tools and FLOSS components, and the security record of FLOSS components is quite impressive. The paper then examines why this is the circumstance."

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Plone API Tutorial in English and Spanish

A new English and Spanish Plone API Tutorial has been announced. "Following the success of ifPeople's publication based on research on Plone, the leading Open Source Content Management System, we have released another great resource for Plone developers - a tutorial on Plone API. Originally created in Spanish for the Plone/Zope training ifPeople sponsored in Argentina, ifPeople has recently translated the document into English for greater access."

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Contests and Awards

Mellon Foundation announces awards for Open Source Software

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced the call for nominations for the 2006 "Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration." "These awards, to be bestowed for the first time at an international technology conference in the Fall of 2006, will recognize not-for-profit organizations that have demonstrated exceptional leadership in the collaborative development of open-source software through the contribution of substantial, self-funded organizational resources to the open-source project for which they are nominated." The awards are worth either $25,000 or $100,000; the nomination deadline is August 15 (according to the press release) or August 4 (according to the call). The committee which will choose the winners includes Mitchell Baker, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, John Gage, Tim O'Reilly, and John Seely Brown.

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OpenOffice.org Developer Article Contests

A new monthly OpenOffice.org Developer Article Contest has been announced, S. Sevki Dincer won the contest for April.

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Upcoming Events

Vancouver Python Workshop

The 2006 Vancouver Python Workshop has been announced. "The conference will begin with keynote addresses on August 4st. Further talks (and tutorials for beginners) will take place on August 5th and 6th."

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13th VistA Community Conference (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews has an announcement for the 13th VistA Community Conference. ""WorldVistA is delighted to announce the 13th VistA Community Conference, to be held from Thursday, June 29th to Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at Robert Morris University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The theme for this meeting is: “Building sustainable, global, collaborative development of VistA”,..."

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Events: May 18 - July 13, 2006

Date	Event	Location
May 18 - 22, 2006	DebConf 6	Oaxtepec, Mexico
May 18, 2006	LinuxWorld on Tour Conference and Expo 2006(LOT2006)	Montreal Ottawa Calgary Vancouver
May 18 - 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 29 - July 2, 2006	UKUUG Linux Technical Conference	(University of Sussex)Brighton, UK
June 30 - July 1, 2006	WebTech 2006	(Kempinski Hotel Zografski)Sofia, Bulgaria
July 3 - 4, 2006	3rd European Lisp Workshop	Nantes, France
July 8 - 9, 2006	PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit	Toronto, Canada
July 10 - 11, 2006	Global db4o User Conference(dUC)	(Imperial College, South Kensington)London, UK
July 13 - 14, 2006	Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment(DIMVA)	Berlin, Germany

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Web sites

New Groklaw Feature: UNIX Methods and Concepts Database (Groklaw)

Groklaw has announced a new searchable database: "I am happy to tell you that we have a new Groklaw feature, a searchable database of UNIX books, articles, whitepapers, Usenet comments, and Internet links. I guess you could call it our UNIX Methods and Concepts Database. Here it is."

Comments (9 posted)

Audio and Video programs

Miguel de Icaza Interview (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop mentions a new podcast interview with Miguel de Icaza. "I don't really know how to format this, since it's a podcast and not an article/story, but Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte interviewed Miguel on their podcast, FLOSS Weekly. You can check it out on the TWiT.tv website. They talk about Miguel's involvement in GNOME, Mono and Novell."

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Page editor: Forrest Cook
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