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Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
FSFE supports new antitrust investigation against Microsoft
The Free Software Foundation Europe has sent out a press release announcing its support for antitrust investigation against Microsoft in the EU. ""Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards," is the message of a letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market."
GnuPG Celebrates 10 Years
The GNU Privacy Guard encryption software project has announced its 10 year anniversary. "It's been a decade now that the very first version of the GNU Privacy Guard [0] has been released. This very first version was not yet known under the name of GnuPG but dubbed "g10" as a reference on the German constitution article on freedom of telecommunication (Grundgesetz Artikel 10) and as a pun on the G-10 law which allows the secret services to bypass these constitutional guaranteed freedoms."
Samba team gets Microsoft protocol documents
The Samba team has announced the signing of an agreement with Microsoft which will result in the delivery of Microsoft's protocol documentation. "We will be able to use the information obtained to continue to develop Samba and create more Free Software. We are hoping to get back to the productive relationship we had with Microsoft during the early 1990's when we shared information about these protocols. The agreement also clarifies the exact patent numbers concerned so there is no possibility of misunderstandings around this issue."
EU antitrust case over: Samba receives interoperability information
The Free Software Foundation Europe has sent out a press release concerning the winning of interoperability information by the Samba project. "In 2004 the European Commission found Microsoft guilty of monopoly abuse in the IT marketplace and demanded that complete interoperability information be made available to competitors. Microsoft objected to this decision and was overruled in September 2007 by the European Court of First Instance (CFI). The CFI found Microsoft guilty of deliberate obstruction of interoperability and upheld the obligation for Microsoft to share its protocol information. The Samba Team has decided to make use of Micrsoft's obligation under the European judgements. Through the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), network interoperability information has been requested and a one-time access fee of 10.000 EUR is being paid to give Samba team full access to important specifications."
Commercial announcements
dimdim partners with SugarCRM
dimdim has announced a partnership with SugarCRM. "dimdim, the world's leading open source web meeting company, today announced that it will be a Premium Provider on SugarExchange, the SugarCRM Marketplace. SugarCRM, the world's leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software has been integrated with dimdim's open source web meeting software, giving companies of all sizes an integrated collaboration and CRM system that is the most fully-functioned, cost-efficient, and customizable solution available anywhere."
A message from Matthew Szulik
Here's a message from Matthew Szulik in the wake of his abrupt decision to step down as CEO of Red Hat. "I take pride when customers and industry types comment to me that the people of Red Hat are 'different.' Not like the cylons who have come to dominate the industry of technology. Through our actions, the open source community and the people of Red Hat are defining a modern economic relationship between developer and customer. Collaboration. Transparency and value delivered. Our customers and marketplace are responding as evidenced by our financials and strong market potential."
Webot announces media player for Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
Webot has announced a media player for the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. "To build the media player, Webot tailored its existing media search, sharing, and player technologies to the unique design of the tablet. With a tap of the screen, users can play any song from any of their computers, anywhere in the world. The system also offers digital picture frames that are automatically updated as new photos arrive, and the ability to share photo albums with family and friends."
New Books
Prototype and script.aculo.us--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book Prototype & script.aculo.us by Christophe Porteneuve.
Packt Publishing announces Qmail Quickstarter
Packt Publishing has published the book Qmail Quickstarter by Kyle Wheeler.
Resources
OLPC News 2007-12-30
The December 30 edition of the One Laptop Per Child project news is out. There is a lot going on, naturally, but the big news is that Mary Lou Jepsen, the creator of the unique display used on the OLPC XO, is moving on to other ventures. "Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year."
Quantum cryptography on the OLPC
The OLPC XO laptop is supposed to be for kids, but, as can be seen on this page, the grownups have been having fun with it as well. "After a few hours of tinkering with the kernel config, timezones (the xo's had to be synchronized with an accuracy of at least 0.5 sec) and the dependencies, the team successfully tested the first 'entanglement based quantum key distribution' between two xo laptops!"
Calls for Presentations
Black Hat Briefings Call for Papers
Calls for papers have gone out for several Black Hat Briefings events. "Black Hat is proud to be holding Trainings and Briefings in Washington D.C., Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Japan, and a mystery location in 2008."
CFP CISIS '08
The first call for papers has gone out for the International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems (CISIS'08). The event will be held in Genova, Italy on October 23-24, 2008, submissions are due by March 14.
FOSDEM 2008: Devroom Talks Wanted (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced a call for speakers for the FOSDEM 2008 Devroom Talks. "As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 23-24 February 2008. FOSDEM is a European meeting of free software developers, to listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software. We are looking for people to give a talk in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. On Sunday, we will be sharing a room with the developers from Gnome. This means that just like last year, we are also interested in talks that transcend free desktops generally."
LinuxWorld conference CFP
A call for papers has gone out for the LinuxWorld conference, the submission deadline is February 22, 2008. The conference will take place on August 4-7, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. "Do you have a topic that would add important content to LinuxWorld? conference program? Then submit your speaking proposal by completing the online form. Prior to filling out the form, please review the content tracks, guidelines, evaluation criteria and other important facts regarding speaking opportunities."
Upcoming Events
First OCaml users group meeting in Paris
The first Paris OCaml users group meeting will be held on January 26, 2008.
QualiPSo Conference 2008
The QualiPSo Conference 2008, the first international conference on Open Source Software quality, will take place in Rome, Italy on January 16-17, 2008.
SCALE Early Bird Registration Ends Jan 5th.
The sixth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) has announced two new keynote speakers, Jono Bacon of Canonical and Stormy Peters of OpenLogic in conjunction with a reminder about early bird registration. SCALE will be held 8-10 February 2008 at the Los Angeles airport Westin hotel. Click below for more information.
SCALE is Full
The Southern California Linux Expo has announced its speakers. The event takes place on February 8-10, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. "The So Cal Linux Expo has filled all available speaker slots for not only the SCALE 6X main conference, but also all three Friday specialty conferences. Over the Friday and Saturday of SCALE there are 36 speaker slots. The SCALE committee received over 75 submittals for the main conference, which were gradually weeded down to those that the committee felt most matched SCALE's goals. Information on the selected session topics is available on the SCALE website".
Events: January 10, 2008 to March 10, 2008
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| January 11 January 13 |
FUDCon Raleigh 2008 | Raleigh, NC, USA |
| January 16 January 17 |
QualiPSo Conference 2008 | Rome, Italy |
| January 17 January 19 |
KDE 4 release event | Mountain View, CA, USA |
| January 24 | Federal DBA Day | Washington DC, USA |
| January 28 February 2 |
Linux.conf.au 2008 | Melbourne, Australia |
| January 28 February 1 |
Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| January 29 January 31 |
Solution Linux 2008 | Paris, France |
| February 1 | Open Island | Belfast, United Kingdom |
| February 6 February 10 |
O'Reilly Money:Tech Conference | New York, NY, USA |
| February 8 February 10 |
Southern California Linux Expo | Los Angeles, USA |
| February 10 February 13 |
NDSS Symposium 2008 | San Diego, CA, USA |
| February 11 | Florida Linux Show 2008 | Jacksonville, Florida, USA |
| February 11 | Open Source Software (OSS) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) | Alexandria, VA, USA |
| February 13 February 15 |
German Perl-Workshop | Regionales Rechenzentrum Erlangen, Germany |
| February 16 | Frozen Perl 2008 Workshop | Minneapolis, USA |
| February 19 February 20 |
Linux Developer Symposium | Beijing, China |
| February 19 February 20 |
Files and Backup | London, UK |
| February 22 February 24 |
freed.in/2008 | Delhi, India |
| February 23 February 24 |
Free/Open Source Developers' European Meeting 2008 | Brussels, Belgium |
| February 23 February 26 |
Linux World Mexico | Mexico City, Mexico |
| February 25 February 26 |
2008 Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop | San Jose, CA, USA |
| February 25 February 29 |
NEW PHP 5 and PostgreSQL Bootcamp with Mark Fenoglio | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| February 28 March 1 |
Linux Audio Conference | Cologne, Germany |
| March 1 March 2 |
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2008 | Chemnitz, Germany |
| March 3 March 6 |
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | San Diego, CA, USA |
| March 3 March 6 |
Drupalcon Boston 2008 | Boston, MA, USA |
| March 4 March 9 |
CeBIT Germany | Hannover, Germany |
| March 8 March 14 |
Asia OSS Conference & Showcase 2008 | Guangzhou, China |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Audio and Video programs
Samba/Windows interoperability news: Jeremy Allison (LinuxWorld)
LinuxWorld has an audio interview with Jeremy Allison. "One of the lead developers at the popular Samba project, which implements Microsoft file and print sharing, talks about today's protocol documentation announcement." (Thanks to Don Marti).
Page editor: Forrest Cook