The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a press release concerning
bogus patents on Internet subdomains.
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is
challenging a bogus patent on Internet subdomains that has
been used to threaten small businesses and innovators.
Ideaflood, a self-proclaimed "intellectual property holding
company," used this illegitimate patent to demand payment
from website hosting companies that offer virtual,
personalized subdomains -- like "action.eff.org" for the
parent domain "eff.org." But in a reexamination request
filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office
(PTO) today, EFF and Rick Mc Leod of Klarquist Sparkman,
LLP show that the method Ideaflood claims to have invented
was well known before the patent was issued. In fact,
website developers were having public discussions about how
to create these virtual subdomains on an Apache developer
mailing list for more than a year before Ideaflood made its
patent claim."
The Free Software Foundation has released the following statement in
response to claims by Microsoft regarding their obligations under the GNU
General Public License version 3 (GPLv3). "We do not, however, agree
with Microsoft's characterization of the situation involving GPLv3.
Microsoft cannot by any act of anticipatory repudiation divest itself of
its obligation to respect others' copyrights. If Microsoft distributes our
works licensed under GPLv3, or pays others to distribute them on its
behalf, it is bound to do so under the terms of that license. It may not
do so under any other terms; it cannot declare itself exempt from the
requirements of GPLv3."
Here is the press release from the Free Software Foundation trying to turn
Windows into an environmental issue. "Today,
environmental and social justice groups united to call for the rejection
of Microsoft Windows Vista and for society's adoption of free software,
highlighting environmental concerns and technology restrictions
associated with proprietary software."
The Linux Foundation has sent out a press release giving its position on
the upcoming vote on the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML format as an ISO/IEC
standard. "For all these reasons and more, the Linux Foundation calls upon those
National Bodies that have not yet cast their votes to vote 'No, with
comments.' Those comments should reflect their best, neutral, technical
judgment, based upon OOXML in its current form. Only by doing so, we believe,
can both the future availability of documents, but the integrity of the
standard setting process be assured."
The Law & Life weblog has a
summary of a decision in the JMRI case in California. "The
decision makes two important points: (1) the Artistic License is a contract
and (2) the failure to include the copyright notices was not a
'restriction' on the scope of the license... The second point is very
important because it deals with remedies. Generally, the remedy for
contract violations under US law is damages, not 'injunctive relief' (which
means that the court order a party to cease their violation). On the other
hand, copyright infringement generally includes a presumption that
injunctive relief is appropriate." LWN first covered the JMRI case in April,
2006; interested parties can read a summary of the case
(which has gotten more complicated since then) or can go straight to the court's ruling
[PDF].
Mandriva has announced the launch of Mandriva Benelux
"Our target areas are
corporate applications and solutions to individuals, educational
institutions, public and private organizations, ISVs and OEMs all over
the Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg region.
The goal of Mandriva Benelux NV is to provide local distribution of
Mandriva Linux and other integrated open source applications in
multiple languages throughout Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg."
Almost one year ago, the One Laptop Per Child project took some grief for developing
device drivers for its laptop under non-disclosure agreements. It was
asserted that, by giving in to hardware vendors in this way, OLPC was
ensuring that specifications for the hardware would never become available.
So it is nice to see that Marvell has followed through on at least part of
its promise and released the 88ALP01 data
sheet. This specification covers the camera, SD, and NAND flash
controllers.
Mozilla has
announced the Firefox browser Campus Edition.
"The bundled version of Firefox
with three popular add-ons is geared towards students and provides easy
access to music, timesaving research tools and highly rated web sites."
Novell, Inc. has
announced a Linux deployment at some German universities.
"Novell today announced that
state universities across the Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia in
Germany have selected Novell for their critical IT infrastructure systems.
The agreement will give 560,000 students and employees across 33
universities access to key enterprise management and Linux* services from
Novell, including SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Desktop."
O'Reilly has published the book Security Power Tools by
Nicolas Beauchesne, Philippe Biondi, Bryan Burns, Chris Iezzoni, Jennifer
Statis Grannick, Paul Guersch, Dave Killion, Michael Lynn, Steve Manzuik,
Eric Markham, Eric Moret and Julien Sobrier.
DesktopLinux.com presents
the results
from the 2007 Desktop Linux Survey.
"The leading Linux distribution is the Ubuntu family -- 30 percent of our survey respondents are using Ubuntu or one of its sister distributions: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu. While there are other distributions that owe a great deal to Ubuntu -- Linspire, Freespire, MEPIS, Linux Mint, and Pioneer all come quickly to mind -- we decided not to count them for Ubuntu this year, since some, like Freespire, have just made the switch, while others, such as MEPIS, are switching back to Debian, and Pioneer is going in its own direction. Next in popularity, after the ever-popular Ubuntu family, comes the SUSE Linux family with 21 percent."
LinuxDevices.com
reports
that LinuxCertified will hold a three-day class on embedded and real-time
Linux development.
"Set for Sept. 12-14 in Sunnyvale, Calif., LinuxCertified's embedded Linux course promises to examine, "why Linux, how to embed Linux, and how to measure and obtain real-time performance," the vendor said."
A Call For Participation has gone out for the 2008 O'Reilly ETel Conference.
"Now in its third year, ETel, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference, brings together all of the voices in telephony that need to be heard--from
telecommunication company executives, garage hackers, mobile executives, programmers, researchers
to venture capitalists, community activists and CEOs. The call for participation is now open;
submissions will be accepted until September 17, 2007.
The conference, taking place March 3-4 in San Diego, California, is an ambitious mix of
inspirational speakers who lay out visionary road maps to the future, combined with practical,
unconventional hacks from small, innovative startups."
A Fedora mini-conf has been scheduled for linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, Australia. Presentations are being solicited for 50, 25, and 10 minute slots. Click below for more information.
LinuxChix, the organization for women who like Linux and free software, announces a mini-conf as part of linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, Australia. A call for 50, 25, and 10 minute presentations is being announced as well. Click below for more information.
A call for papers has gone out for the MySQL Miniconf at LinuxConfAU 2008.
"There are about 6 or 7 slots of 50 minutes each. We could do 2x25
minutes for some, and possibly a slot with 5 minute lightning talks.
A proposal should contain a short title and abstract of what you
intend to talk about, what duration the talk would be (5, 25, 50),
and a brief bio of yourself."
The Cell Hack-a-thon II will be held in Austin, TX on September
22-25, 2007.
"You are invited to attend Hack-a-thon II, Austin, Texas, September
22-25, two days prior to and then in conjunction with the Power
Architecture Developer Conference.
In this 4 day event, Terra Soft will host a 6 node PS3 cluster and
hands-on workshop for the installation of Yellow Dog Linux, compute
image deployment via Y-HPC, and use of Torque and Moab for job
management. Hack-a-thon attendees are given opportunity to test their
own parallel and distributed code."
HITBSecConf2007 will be held on September 3-6, 2007 in Malaysia.
"Organized as a
community centric, non-profit effort, HITBSecConf is Asia's largest
network security event featuring 4 keynote speakers, 7 tracks of
technical training sessions and access to over 30 hours of deep
knowledge demos and presentations!"
The Linux Foundation has announced a Legal Summit.
"The Linux Foundation is pleased to issue an invitation to in-house
counsel for all of our members to participate in the Linux Foundation
Legal Summit on October 25 and 26, 2007. This collaborative workshop
will provide an opportunity for in-house counsel involved in shaping
member policies around open source or open standards issues to lend
their experience and expertise to the development of Linux Foundation
legal strategy."
The Office 2.0 Conference will take place in San Francisco, CA
on September 5-7, 2007.
"The event will feature over 100 speakers and panelists, and
include 6 keynote presentations and 21 panels.
The conference will be kicked off with a quick presentation of the exclusive applications developed
for the iPhone by Etelos, and an introduction to the enterprise-grade WiFi network deployed for the
event by Covad and Swisscom. This year, every attendee will receive an iPhone to support real-time
collaboration during the event."
The Ubuntu Developer Summit to plan the next Ubuntu release has been announced. It is slated for 27 October through 2 November in Cambridge, Mass. Click below for more details.
Seb Ruiz has announced
the availability of video interviews from the KDE Multimedia Meeting.
"You might remember, that a little over a year ago kde.nl graciously hosted the KDE multimedia meeting (or k3m for short). Whilst we were there, hacking away, the folks from Source21 joined us to do some interviews for their open source software vidcast. If you take some time to watch the video, youll hear from Martijn Klingens (KDE marketing, KDE.nl), Matthias Kretz (Phonon) and myself (Amarok) speaking about our respective areas of expertise."