Announcements

Non-Commercial announcements

BusyBox settles another lawsuit

The Software Freedom Law Center has sent out a press release on the settlement of another BusyBox GPL-infringement lawsuit. "As a result of the plaintiffs agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit and reinstate High-Gain Antennas' rights to distribute BusyBox under the GPL, High-Gain Antennas has agreed to appoint an Open Source Compliance Officer within its organization to monitor and ensure GPL compliance, to publish the source code for the version of BusyBox it previously distributed on its Web site, and to undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from High-Gain Antennas of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid by High-Gain Antennas to the plaintiffs."

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GNOME Foundation Annual Report for 2007

The GNOME Foundation has released an annual report as a rather slickly-produced PDF file. "We have completed our original goal. Ten years ago, GNU/Linux distributions did not include a free and usable web browser. Ten years ago, using only free software, you could not do graphic design and illustration, you could not balance your checkbook, you could not download pictures from your camera to the computer, you could not do phone calls over the Internet, you could not create a spreadsheet with pie charts, and you could not plug a USB drive into your computer and expect it to 'just work'. Okay, USB sticks didn't exist ten years ago, but you get the idea."

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Google Summer of Code 2008 (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has announced the participation of the Mozilla project in the Google Summer of Code 2008. "Gervase Markham wrote in to inform us that Mozilla intends to participate in Google Summer of Code 2008 as a mentoring organization. Gerv's weblog post calls on interested people to submit proposals at the Brainstorming page at mozilla wiki."

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New OpenOffice.org license and contributor agreement

The OpenOffice.org office suite project has announced license change and a new contributor agreement. "The license for code is changing from the early LGPL v 2.1 to 3.0 effective the Beta of OpenOffice.org 3.0. (The actual date of this beta has not been finalized.) The Joint Copyright Assignment form (JCA) is being replaced by the Sun Microsystems Inc. Contributor Agreement (SCA). This change is effective immediately with this announcement."

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Petition calls for Open Standards in the European Parliament

The Free Software Foundation Europe has announced a petition that calls for open standards in the European Parliament. "At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use Open Standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process."

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SFLC: Do not rely on Microsoft's Open Specification Promise

The Software Freedom Law Center has posted a position paper on Microsoft's recently-announced "Open Specification Promise" and how it relates to free software. "In response to these requests for clarification, we publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license."

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Commercial announcements

Funambol launches new Code Sniper projects

Funambol has announced new Code Sniper projects. "Code Sniper is Funambol's community program that rewards developers with monetary bounties to work on open source projects that benefit mobile users around the globe. This new slate of Code Sniper projects ranges from syncing pictures of friends on social networks to the address book on a mobile phone, to making it easy to invite your mobile contacts to join your favorite social network. All of the apps developed as part of Code Sniper are made freely available under standard open source licensing."

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Komodo IDE 4.3 features find and replace system

ActiveState has announced Komodo IDE 4.3. "After an award-winning major release a year ago, ActiveState's Komodo IDE continues its evolution with major new features and improvements in Komodo IDE 4.3, released today. The integrated development environment (IDE) for dynamic languages added powerful Find in Project and Replace in Files features, new Unit Testing integration, improved Source Code Control, and an Abbreviation feature in addition to performance improvements."

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Microsoft Launches Document Interoperability Initiative

Microsoft Corp. has announced their Document Interoperability Initiative. "Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of its Document Interoperability Initiative, which is aimed at promoting user choice among document formats and expanded opportunity for developers, partners and competitors. The launch of this initiative is an important step in Microsoft's commitment to implement a set of strategic changes in its technology and business practices to expand interoperability through the implementation of its interoperability principles. The Document Interoperability Initiative focuses on bringing vendors together to promote interoperability between document format implementations through testing and refining those implementations, creation of format implementation test suites, and the creation of templates designed for optimal interoperability between different formats."

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New Books

ScreenOS Cookbook--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has published the book ScreenOS Cookbook by Stefan Brunner, Vik Davar, David Delcourt, Ken Draper, Joe Kelly and Sunil Wadhwa.

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The Ultimate CSS Reference--New from SitePoint

SitePoint has published the book The Ultimate CSS Reference by Tommy Olssen and Paul O'Brien.

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Resources

Clean Room Design Practice (OpenCollector)

OpenCollector.org has announced a paper [pdf] on the clean room design practice for reverse engineering hardware. "Wade D. Peterson of Silicore (the people who created the free Wishbone SOC architecture) has written a major new paper on clean room design practice, full of detail on the legal aspects of reverse engineering and practical methods for separating copyright and patent governed aspects of a design, essential for creating open and interoperable designs."

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Contests and Awards

Stroustrup presented with Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming award

Bjarne Stroustrup has received a Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. "2008-Best-selling author Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ and author of the Addison-Wesley title The C++ Programming Language, was presented with the Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming Award at the SD West conference on Wednesday. The award acknowledges significant achievements in object-oriented programming, software architecture, and modeling."

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Meeting Minutes

Minutes of GNOME Summer of Code meeting

The minutes are available from the March 6, 2008 GNOME Summer of Code meeting. "Present: Adam Schreiber Buddhika Laknath Semage Christian Kellner Gabriel Burt Johannes Schmid Lucas Rocha Marco Barisione Rob Taylor Sandy Armstrong Vincent Untz".

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Calls for Presentations

Call for Presentations -- Flash Memory Summit 2008

A call for presentations has gone out for the Flash Memory Summit 2008. The event takes place in Santa Clara, CA on August 12-14, 2008. The submission deadline is April 25.

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LinuxWorld 2008 is looking for BOF topics and .org Exhibitors

The LinuxWorld conference is looking for Birds of a Feather (BOF) session proposals as well as free software projects to exhibit in the .org pavilion. The conference is being held August 4-7 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The deadline for .org pavilion applications is April 11, while BOF proposals need to be in by May 5. Click below for more information.

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Upcoming Events

Global Open Source Conference announced

SDForum has announced the Global Open Source Conference, which takes place on March 24, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. "Speakers at the event will discuss the opportunities for open source software companies and developersthanks to government initiatives using open source, as well as sharinglearning lessons and successes from around the world. "Open source has quickly changed the global software industry," said Don Brown of Atlassian Software Systems, a speaker at the event. "A huge demand has arisen for open source companies worldwide as more governments enforce policies mandating open source and international markets continue to open.""

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GoOOoCon2008 / Prague

GoOOoCon 2008 will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on April 10-13, 2008. "The Novell team thought that, what with the next OOoCon being in Beijing and the cost of travel there (etc.) and of course the broad focus of that conference; that it would be good to have a very hacker-focused event in Europe. So, we're inviting all hyper-technical people (with or without long hair) to join the Novell go-oo team for part of their annual team face-to-face in Prague."

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KVM developer forum 2008

The KVM developer forum 2008 has been announced. "The KVM Forum 2008 will also give developers an opportunity to update the community on the work that they are doing and coordinate efforts for the betterment of KVM and Linux virtualization. Please reserve these dates, the event will take on June 11th - 13th, at Marriot Napa Valley, California, USA. For those of you who want to get there earlier, we will be holding a reception cocktail on June 10th evening time. The registration web site will be up shortly as will the call for papers".

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The Linux Foundation Reveals Speaker Line-up for 2nd Annual Collaboration Summit

The Linux Foundation has announced the speakers for its 2nd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit."The Collaboration Summit is designed to accelerate collaboration and problem solving in the Linux community by bringing key stakeholders together in a neutral setting. While there are a variety of industry and developer conferences, the LF Collaboration Summit is the only one to combine participation from developers, users, vendors, ISVs, attorneys and C-level executives to tackle the most pressing issues facing Linux." The summit takes place April 8 - 10, 2008 at the UT Super Computing Center in Austin, TX.

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PTPW 2008 :: Registrations open (usePerl)

Registration is open for PTPW 2008. "Registration and payment for the Portuguese Perl Workshop is finally open. Seats for the workshop and for the training classes are limited, so grab yours soon. Workshop seats: 100."

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PyCon 2008 begins on March 13 in Chicago

PyCon 2008 begins on March 13. "PyCon 2008 kicks off Thursday, March 13 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare Hotel featuring talks and tutorials from Caltech, Google, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, One Laptop per Child, Red Hat, and the University of California, Berkeley. Organized by the Python Software Foundation, and staffed entirely by volunteers, this annual community conference boasts more than double the number of tutorials compared to 2007."

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Mailing Lists

OLPC-Health mailing list announced

A new OLPC-Health mailing list has been created.

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Web sites

MacForge.net launched

MacForge.net has been launched. "MacTech(r) Magazine announced today that its MacForge(tm) Mac open source project index now has over 50,000 projects. In 2005, MacForge.net was created for not only the experienced open source user, but to introduce the Mac technical community to the wonderful array of projects available."

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Audio and Video programs

LCA Gaming Miniconf proceedings videos are available

Videos from the Linux.conf.au 2008 Gaming Miniconf are available. "There where loads of interesting talks, so if you where silly enough to not be there, you can now get in on the fun. Find out about a program which makes games from children's crayon drawings. Listen to how FOSS is being used to teach the next generation of game developers and find out how FOSS is being used in Australian commercial game companies. Don't forget to view the pyglet pinata session for the coolest live coding session you have ever seen (Space Invaders in under 40 minutes). Even Rusty Russell, our favourite kernel hacker turned game developer, makes an appearance with Pong Hero!"

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