Non-Commercial announcements
The Electronic Frontier Foundation discusses the legal implications of
a case between Tiffany and eBay.
"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
along with Public Citizen and Public Knowledge urged a U.S.
court of appeals Wednesday to reject jewelry-maker
Tiffany's attempt to rewrite trademark law and create new
barriers for online commerce and communication.
Tiffany sued the online marketplace eBay, claiming that
eBay should be held liable for trademark infringement when
sellers offer counterfeit Tiffany goods on the eBay site.
The evidence in the case showed that eBay quickly takes
down listings when Tiffany sends notice that it believes a
specific item is not genuine. However, Tiffany wants eBay
to police listings on its own and to be held responsible
for any counterfeit items it missed."
Full Story (comments: none)
The 2008
Perl Advent Calendar
has been
announced.
"
Did anybody yet mention that the Perl Advent Calendar 2008 is live? Take a look: one article a introducing a module that is not as well known as it deserves, per day, until Christmas."
Also, the
Catalyst web framework Advent Calendar is online with daily tips.
Comments (none posted)
Commercial announcements
Appcelerator, Inc. has announced the public preview
release of their Appcelerator Titanium web technology platform.
"
Titanium allows developers to use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to
quickly and easily develop applications that can be deployed to multiple platforms, including the
desktop, the browser or the mobile device. Unlike traditional Web applications, which are limited
to operating within the browser, Titanium desktop applications are able to read and write local
data on the desktop and interact with the operating system."
Full Story (comments: none)
IBM has
announced
the availability of a new desktop offering based on Ubuntu Linux.
"
This solution runs open standards-based email, word processing,
spreadsheets, unified communication, social networking and other software
to any laptop, browser, or mobile device from a virtual desktop login on a
Linux-based server configuration." Only $49/user in quantities of
1,000.
Comments (70 posted)
Redpill Linpro has announced the release of Multiframe version 5
under a GPL license.
"
Redpill Linpro, a leading Nordic vendor of Open Source products
and services, have released the source code for its industry-leading thin client management tool -
Multiframe. The availability of the source code for Multiframe version 5 encourages the Open
Source community to build new features and applications to enhance the capabilities of the software
package."
Full Story (comments: none)
Release Candidate 1 of Renoise 2.0 is available.
"
Renoise has a different approach to making music compared to conventional sequencers, called
Tracking. Tracking comes from the demoscene that pushes technical limits to show off coding skills,
art, and music beyond what is thought possible."
The software is not open-source, but the free demo is fun.
Full Story (comments: none)
New Books
Mark Summerfield has announced his new book
Programming in Python 3.
Full Story (comments: 2)
O'Reilly has published the book
Learning Rails by Simon St. Laurent
and Edd Dumbill.
Full Story (comments: none)
No Starch Press has published the book
Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts by
Steve Pugh.
Full Story (comments: none)
An Official Manual for the Scribus desktop publishing system has been
announced.
"
The long-awaited Scribus Official Manual is in its final stages of production, and we now have a site open for pre-publishing sales. For those who are not already aware, the manual began about one year ago as a collaborative effort. The lead authors, Gregory Pittman and Christoph Schäfer, worked with a number of other contributors on this important project.
The manual represents the most comprehensive source of information about using Scribus, and includes other useful information about DTP, fonts, color management, and more."
Comments (none posted)
Resources
The Free Software Foundation Europe analyzes the conflicts between patents
and standards.
"
Following up on the European Commission's "IPR in ICT Standardisation"
workshop two weeks ago in Brussels, FSFE president Georg Greve analysed
the conflicts between patents and standards. The resulting
paper
is about the most harmful effects of patents on standards, the
effectiveness of current remedies, and potential future remedies."
Full Story (comments: none)
The Free Software Foundation Europe's Freedom Task Force and
GPL-Violations.org have teamed up to produce a
guide
to reporting and fixing license violations. The guide looks at steps
to take as well as resources available for reporting a violation, handling
a violation report, and avoiding violations to begin with. "
Be
careful when reporting a violation. Accusations and suspicions voiced on
public mailing lists create uncertainty and do little to solve
violations. By checking your facts you can help experts resolve violations
quickly." Click below for the press release announcing the guide.
Full Story (comments: 4)
Open World Forum has
announced the
availability of the 2020 FLOSS Roadmap, a
78-page
PDF file describing this group's vision of where free software is
going. "
This is a prospective Roadmap, and a projection of the
influences that will affect FLOSS between now (2008) and 2020, with
descriptions of all FLOSS-related trends as anticipated by OWF contributors
over this period of time. It also highlights all sectors that will,
potentially, be impacted by FLOSS, from the economy to the Information
Society."
Comments (none posted)
Calls for Presentations
Registration
is open for SCALE 7x, the Southern California Linux Exposition.
SCALE will be held on February 20-22, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.
"
Due to the holidays the Calls For Proposals for SCALE 7x have been extended until December 10th,
2008. The Beginner and Developer tracks are almost full; there are still available spots in the
three general audience speaker tracks. But if you're considering submitting a proposal, don't
delay; the window of opportunity is closing!
OSSIE, the Open Source Software in Education seminar and WIOS, the Women in Open Source seminar
still have open speaker spots in their Friday tracks. Their Calls for Papers close December 31st."
Full Story (comments: none)
Upcoming Events
Events: December 18, 2008 to February 16, 2009
The following event listing is taken from the
LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
December 27 December 30 |
Chaos Communication Congress |
Berlin, Germany |
January 8 January 11 |
Consumer Electronics Show |
Las Vegas, NV, USA |
January 9 January 11 |
Fedora User and Developer Conference |
Boston, USA |
January 15 January 16 |
Foundations of Open Media Software 2009 |
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia |
January 17 January 23 |
Camp KDE 2009 |
Negril, Jamaica |
January 19 January 24 |
linux.conf.au - penguins march south |
Hobart, Australia |
January 25 January 29 |
Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn |
Atlanta, GA, USA |
January 25 January 28 |
GCC Research Opportunities |
Paphos, Cyprus |
| January 31 |
Greater London Linux Users Group meeting |
London, UK |
January 31 February 3 |
Black Hat Briefings DC |
Arlington, VA, USA |
February 4 February 5 |
DC BSDCon 2009 |
Washington, D.C., USA |
February 4 February 6 |
Money:Tech 2009 |
New York, NY, USA |
February 5 February 9 |
German Perl Workshop |
Frankfurt, Germany |
| February 7 |
Frozen Perl 2009 |
Minneapolis, MN., USA |
February 7 February 8 |
FOSDEM 2009 |
Brussels, Belgium |
February 9 February 11 |
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing |
New York, NY, USA |
| February 15 |
Free Software Awards 2009 Deadline |
Soissons, France |
If your event does not appear here, please
tell us about it.
Mailing Lists
A new python-porting mailing list has been announced.
"
Hi all,
to facilitate discussion about porting Python code between different versions
(mainly of course from 2.x to 3.x), we've created a new mailing list
python-porting@python.org
It is a public mailing list open to everyone. We expect active participation
of many people porting their libraries/programs, and hope that the list can
be a help to all wanting to go this (not always smooth :-) way."
Full Story (comments: 2)
Page editor: Forrest Cook