Announcements

Non-Commercial announcements

Congress Must Investigate Electronic Searches at U.S. Borders (EFF)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking the US congress to hold oversight hearings on the Department of Homeland Security's search and seizure of electronic devices at US borders. ""Our computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices hold a vast amount of personal information like financial data, health histories, and personal emails and letters," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "In a free country, the government cannot have unlimited power to read, seize, and store this information without any oversight.""

Full Story (comments: none)

2008Q2 TPF Grant Proposals (use Perl)

use Perl covers the latest Perl Foundation grant proposals. "On The Perl Foundation weblog are a set of posts with proposals received by the Grants Committee during the second call for grant proposals for 2008. Although not usual, the rules of the TPF Grants Committee are changing and we hope to make this a rule. Proposals are accepted during one month and after that period, they are posted for public discussion. This is important to make the Grants Committee more aware of the community interest on the project, and to help opening the grants attribution process."

Comments (none posted)

Latest Samba volunteer job postings

The Samba project has posted a request for volunteer help. "The Samba Team is looking for people to help keep our user community information current, covering development news, releases, general news, and events."

Comments (none posted)

Welte v. Skype going to trial

Harald Welte lets it be known that there will be a hearing on May 8 in his GPL-enforcement case against Skype, which is shipping Linux-based phones without making source available. "Interestingly, Skype is arguing against the validity of the GPL as a whole, asserting that it is violating anti-trust regulation and similarly strange claims."

Comments (16 posted)

Commercial announcements

Adobe's Open Screen Project

Adobe has announced the "Open Screen Project," which seems mainly oriented toward getting flash players onto everybody's phones. One of the outcomes, though, is that the licensing restrictions on the Flash specifications (which prevented people from using those specifications to make competing Flash players) have been lifted. The Flash 9 specification can now be downloaded from this page.

Comments (14 posted)

Continuent announces uni/cluster 2008 for PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB

Continuent, Inc. has announced the availability of Continuent uni/cluster 2008. "This newest version of Continuent's uni/cluster software provides the highest levels of availability and scalability for database applications built using PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus databases. Continuent uni/cluster offers a multi-master approach to replication. Data is committed and available to all nodes in the cluster simultaneously, effectively eliminating data latency and providing increased reliability through redundancy."

Full Story (comments: none)

Mozilla selects MindTouch as future platform for developer community

MindTouch has announced the release of MindTouch Deki Wiki v8.05, the latest version of its open source enterprise collaboration and integration platform. The Deki Wiki v8.05 release was driven in part by the requirements of Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of their Mozilla Developer Community.

Full Story (comments: none)

Motorola demonstrates MOTODEV Studio Tools

Motorola, Inc. has announced the expansion of their MOTODEV Studio development platform for mobile phones. "Based on an open framework enabled by Eclipse, MOTODEV Studio is an integrated development environment that provides the necessary tools for the application development life cycle -- from requirements definition to testing and deployment -- across all Motorola platforms. MOTODEV Studio and its associated toolsets are designed to enable developers all over the world to create platform-specific applications for Motorola devices -- even before they are available on the market."

Comments (none posted)

SDG Systems Announces Linux-based TDS Nomad

SDG Systems, LLC has announced the immediate availability of their Linux-based TDS Nomad rugged mobile hand-held computer. "The Nomad provides a high level of device integration including Bluetooth, 802.11, GPS, Camera, Barcode scanning and USB host and client ports. All Nomads also include a high-resolution screen (480x640 portrait VGA) for sharp, clear images and a 806 MHz PXA 320 processor. The USB host port has been tested to support mass storage, keyboard, mouse, Ethernet and RS-232 serial adapters."

Comments (none posted)

New Books

Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs--New From O'Reilly

O'Reilly has published the book Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs by Duane Wessels and Matthew J. Weaver.

Full Story (comments: none)

Programming in Python 3 released by Safari Books Online

Mark Summerfield has announced the online availability of his new book Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language. "The online version contains about half the book so far and is about six weeks behind my working copy. It is accurate for Python 3.0 alpha 4. More text will be added and updates made as the book and Python progress. The book began life last year once it was clear that Python 3 was going to come out this year. The printed version should be available in October in the U.S.---but it will only go to press once all the examples and snippets have been tested against Python 3.0 final, so the date will slip if Python's release date slips."

Full Story (comments: none)

Education and Certification

OpenEMR HQ to offer second online training session (LinuxMedNews)

LinuxMedNews notes that OpenEMR HQ will offer online training on May 27, 2008. "OpenEMR HQ, Inc., announced today that it plans to offer a second online training session for those interested in the OpenEMR software but who aren't able to attend an in-person event at their Tulsa facility."

Comments (none posted)

Calls for Presentations

Deadline for Akademy 2008 Presentation Proposals Extended (KDE.News)

The deadline for submitting a proposal to Akademy 2008 has been extended until Monday, May 12, 2008, 23:59 UTC. "Tell the world about your contribution to KDE. Tell the community what cool things you have done with KDE."

Comments (none posted)

OpenOffice.org: what can you share with the community?

A call for papers has gone out for OOoCon 2008. The event will be held in Beijing, China on November 5-7, 2008. The submission deadline is June 20. "The OpenOffice.org Community invites potential speakers to submit proposals for papers for the OpenOffice.org annual international conference, OOoCon 2008. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about OpenOffice.org - we want to hear from you."

Full Story (comments: none)

OSDC 2008 Sydney call for papers

A call for papers has gone out for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2008. The event will take place in Sydney, Australia on December 1-5, 2008. The submission deadline is June 30.

Full Story (comments: none)

PyOhio call for proposals

A call for proposals has gone out for PyOhio. "PyOhio, the first annual Python programming mini-conference for Ohio and surrounding areas will take place Saturday, July 26, in Columbus, Ohio. The conference is free of change and will include scheduled presentations, Lighting Talks and unconference-style Open Spaces." The submission deadline is June 1.

Full Story (comments: none)

Upcoming Events

Linux Installfest workshop in Davis, CA

The Linux Users' Group of Davis will hold the next Linux Installfest workshop in Davis, CA on Saturday, May 17.

Full Story (comments: none)

PyPy sprint - Berlin

The PyPy sprint will take place in Berlin, Germany on May 17-22, 2008. "The next PyPy sprint will be in the crashed `c-base space station`_, Berlin, Germany, Earth, Solar System. This is a fully public sprint: newcomers (from all planets) and topics other than those proposed below are welcome."

Full Story (comments: none)

Events: May 15, 2008 to July 14, 2008

The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.

Date(s)	Event	Location
May 15	NLUUG spring conference 2008	Ede, the Netherlands
May 15 May 16	YAPC::Asia 2008	Tokyo, Japan
May 15 May 16	V WHYFLOSS CONFERENCE CORRIENTES 08	Corrientes, Argentina
May 16 May 17	FOSSCamp 2008	Prague, Czech Republic
May 17 May 18	4th Int. Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems (SESS'08)	Leipzig, Germany
May 17 May 18	French-speaking Python Days	Paris, France
May 19 May 23	AFS and Kerberos Best Practices Workshop 2008	Newark, NJ, USA
May 20 May 23	PGCon 2008	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
May 20 May 21	Digital Standards Organization (Digistan) Workshop	The Hague, The Netherlands
May 21 May 22	EUSecWest 2008	London, England
May 21 May 22	linuxdays.ch Genève	Genève, Switzerland
May 28 May 31	LinuxTag 2008 where .com meets .org	Berlin, Germany
May 29 June 1	RailsConf 2008	Portland, OR, USA
May 29 May 30	SyScan’08 Hong Kong	Hong Kong, China
May 30 May 31	eLiberatica 2008 - The benefits of Open and Free Technologies	Bucharest, Romania
June 2 June 5	VON.x Europe	Amsterdam, the Netherlands
June 3 June 4	Nordic Nagios Meet	Stockholm, Sweden
June 6 June 7	Portuguese Perl Workshop	Braga, Portugal
June 6 June 7	European Tcl/Tk User Meeting 2008	Strasbourg, France
June 9 June 13	Python Bootcamp with David Beazley	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
June 10 June 15	REcon 2008	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
June 11 June 13	kvm developer's forum 2008	Napa, CA, USA
June 16 June 18	YAPC::NA 2008	Chicago, IL, USA
June 17 June 22	Liverpool Open Source City	Liverpool, England
June 18 June 20	Red Hat Summit 2008	Boston, MA, USA
June 18 June 20	National Computer and Information Security Conference ACIS 2008	Bogota, Columbia
June 19 June 21	Fedora Users and Developers Conference	Boston, MA, USA
June 22 June 27	2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference	Boston, MA, USA
June 23 June 24	O'Reilly Velocity Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
June 28 June 29	Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008	Berlin, Germany
July 1 July 5	Libre Software Meeting 2008	Mont-de-Marsan, France
July 3 July 4	SyScan’08 Singapore	Novotel Clarke Quay, Singapore
July 3	Penguin in a Box 2008: Embedded Linux Seminar	Herzelia, Israel
July 5	Open Tech 2008	London, England
July 7 July 12	EuroPython 2008	Vilnius, Lithuania
July 7 July 12	GUADEC 2008	Istanbul, Turkey

If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.

Web sites

Blogging platform for openSUSE launched

The openSUSE distribution has announced a new blogging site. "We're launching today officially a new website: lizards.opensuse.org! This site offers blog hosting for openSUSE members. The blogs should be focused on the openSUSE project, e.g. on the distribution, packages, build service, events, etc. Please contact the site administrators (via mail to news-submit@opensuse.org) if you want to have your blog created."

Full Story (comments: none)

Page editor: Forrest Cook