James Love reports
on the latest attempt to get the text of the proposed ACTA treaty from the US
government. "The agreement, misleadingly named the
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, is thought to cover a wide
range of intellectual property enforcement issues -- including standards
for granting injunctions for alleged infringement of patents or copyrights,
damages, seizures of goods in transit, surveillance of Internet digital
file transfers, searches of personal property, and a dozen other
topics." The answer: the treaty, despite being available to
governments and lobbyists, is classified for "national security" reasons
and we cannot see it.
"Change," it seems, only goes so far.
A call for submissions has gone out for
the Common Persistent Model
Patterns for Performance and/or Scalability Optimization reports.
"ODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent non-profit group of high-profile
software experts lead by Prof. Roberto Zicari, today announced
the opening of a call for submissions for Common Persistent Model
Patterns for Performance and/or Scalability Optimization.
ODBMS.ORG invites both vendors and Application architects,
Enterprise architects, Developers who use databases to submit
implementation techniques (database design patterns) which are
generally useful for all adopters.
The best submissions will be published in a new series of reports
in ODBMS.ORG. All submissions will be published under free
software licenses."
Submissions are due by May 29, 2009.
The FFII has sent out an advisory warning that the European Patent Office
is trying to establish software patents via an indirect route.
"The President of the European Patent Office (EPO), Alison Brimelow, has
asked the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) to decide on the interpretation
of the European Patent Convention (EPC) regarding the exclusion of
software from patentability. The EBA is replacing the European
Parliament in order to validate software patents EU-wide without the
need of a debate." There is an opportunity to comment on the upcoming
decision through the end of April.
The Audacity
audio editor project has announced
a preliminary call for students for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.
"GSoC offers student developers a $4,500 stipend to write code for open source projects. We're asking interested students to contact us now to discuss their proposals. We're looking for projects that will move us towards a new stable 1.4 Release later this year.
If you are an eligible student, or know one who might be interested, please review our draft documentation."
The XMMS audio player project has
announced its application for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.
"We have just applied for Google Summer of Code 2009. Hopefully we will be included in the program for the fourth year in a row. Get involved in our ideas and community now!"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced a
search tool
for uncovered government documents.
"In celebration of Sunshine Week, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched a
sophisticated search tool that allows the public to closely
examine thousands of pages of documents the organization has
pried loose from secretive government agencies. The
documents relate to a wide range of cutting-edge technology
issues and government policies that affect civil liberties
and personal privacy."
A call for participation is out for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. The
Summit will also co-host GUADEC, the GNOME Conference and Akademy, the KDE
conference. The Desktop Summit runs from July 4 to July 10 2009, in Las
Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain.
The first
annual Japan Linux Symposium will be held October 21-23 in Tokyo,
immediately after the 2009 Kernel Summit. The call
for participation is now open, with submissions due by May 1. JLS
looks to be an interesting event, bringing together developers from around
the world in a country which is rapidly becoming a major contributor.
Talks are sought on a wide variety of topics; see the CFP for details.
A call for participation has gone out for ToorCamp 2009.
"ToorCamp is the United State's first ever full-scale hacker camp. Modelled after the camps in
Holland and Germany, ToorCamp will focus on all of the technology topics that ToorCon has become
famous for but will expand out into other areas of society. ToorCamp will offer 2 days of talks on
many different topics -- Security, Internet, Emerging Technologies, Hardware Hacking, and Privacy
are just some of the areas we will be covering. ToorCamp will also feature 2 days of hands-on
workshops on a multitude of different skills that you may have never found yourself interested in
learning about before. Blacksmithing, Lock Picking, Orienteering, Logic Design, Archery -- These
are just a few of the topics you can expect."
The event takes place on July 2-5, 2009 in a Titan-1 missile silo near
Moses Lake, WA. Submissions are due by April 3.
YAPC::NA::09 tickets are
discounted
until March 25. The event takes place in Pittsburgh, PA on
June 22-24.
"The very first Yet Another Perl Conference was held in '99. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of that event, we are offering a special YAPC|10 admission price of $99 but only for 10 days! After that, the price goes up to $125." Also, a
call for proposals
has been announced for the event, submissions are due by April 24.
The preliminary schedule for PGCon 2009 has been announced,
the event takes place on May 19-22 in Ottawa, Canada.
"PGCon is the premiere PostgreSQL conference. It is simply the best
place to meet other PostgreSQL people and learn more. The talks are
absolutely amazing, not to mention the great social atmosphere."
PyCon 2009 will host some cross-community summit meetings.
"Python programmers won't be the only ones coming to PyCon this month.
PyCon 2009 is hosting two new summit events that will draw key developers and strategists not only
from Python, but also from the Perl, Ruby, Java, .NET, and JavaScript communities.
The Virtual Machine Summit on March 25, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and Python Language Summit
on March 26, both at PyCon 2009 in Chicago, are invitation-only events that will bring
cross-discipline groups together to discuss and strategize on challenges that are common across
their projects."
Conference videos from Fosdem 2009 are available.
"In our tradition of releasing embedded Linux conference videos, we are
happy to release 9 videos from the embedded room at the Fosdem 2009
conference in Brussels last month".