The Free Software Foundation has put out a release stating that Microsoft's
"Community Promise" is not sufficient, and that free software developers
should still avoid mono. "The Community Promise only extends to claims in Microsoft patents that
are *necessary* to implement the covered specifications. Judging just
by the size of its patent portfolio, it's likely that Microsoft holds
patents which a complete standard implementation probably infringes
even if it's not strictly necessary--maybe the patent covers a
straightforward speed optimization, or some common way of performing
some task. The Community Promise doesn't say anything about these
patents, and so Microsoft can still use them to threaten standard
implementations."
KDE.News
covers
a new repository commit milestone.
"KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system.
"This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world.""
A group called Open Source
for America has announced its
existence. "The mission of Open Source for America is to serve
as a centralized advocate and to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government
support of and participation in free and open source
software. Specifically, Open Source for America will: help effect change in
policies and practices to allow the Federal Government to better utilize
these technologies; help coordinate these communities to collaborate with
the federal government on technology requirements; and raise awareness and
create understanding among federal government leaders about the values and
implications of open source software." In other words, we finally
have a lobbying organization in the US. There's a fairly high-profile
board of advisors (Ghosh, Moglen, O'Reilly, Peters, Phipps, Shuttleworth,
Tiemann, Zemlin, ...), some case studies, and, inevitably, a Twitter feed.
Palm has announced the release of the Mojo Software Development Kit.
"After a successful early access program, Palm's
Mojo Software Development Kit is available to all
interested app developers. The SDK can be downloaded
from a new developer portal -- Palm webOSdev -- at
developer.palm.com. Any interested developer with a
valid email address can access the SDK, its associated
documentation, and new Mojo developer forums."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the publication
of a new guide: Surveillance Self-Defense International.
"Recent political protests in Iran, China, and elsewhere
have demonstrated the enormous power of the Internet for
organizing protests and reporting events to the world. But
governments have also used the Internet to track, harass,
and undermine. SSDI urges activists to consider the risks
in using various technologies and outlines strategies that
can allow protestors to continue to use the Internet
safely."
The first issue of Open Source Database Magazine is available as a 26-page PDF file. It includes articles on XtraBackup, PostgreSQL 8.4, and more. "Welcome to the inaugural issue of Open Source Database Magazine. It is my goal that this magazine
provides a place for people to learn about open source databases of any stripe - be they Postgres,
SQLite, MySQL, Drizzle, CouchDB, Hadoop or something else."
O'Reilly has published a report from the recent Velocity Conference.
"The second year of the O'Reilly Velocity Web Performance and
Operations Conference drew more than 700 web developers and experts, a larger group than attended
last year's, to San Jose June 22-24, 2009. They came to Velocity to pose their toughest questions
to the people doing the best performance and operations work in the world."
We just got a reminder that the call for papers for linux.conf.au 2010
(January 18 to 23, Wellington, New Zealand) will close on Friday,
July 24. It's time for all the procrastinators out there to start
pulling together their thoughts and put in a proposal. "The LCA2010
Papers Committee is looking for a broad range of papers spanning everything
from programming and software to desktop and userspace to community,
government and education."
A call for participation has gone out for the
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, the submission deadline
is September 1.
"The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) will
explore the critical trends emerging around the business of digital publishing February 22-24,
2010, at the Marriot Marquis in New York City. From authoring, editing, and layout to distribution
and consumption, new technologies are changing all aspects of publishing. As digitalization and
globalization continue to accelerate the rate of change, publishers face the urgent necessity of
building a solid business on the shifting foundation of paid vs. free content, format and device
innovations, conflicting standards and royalties. TOC offers publishers the blueprints for
success."
Registration is open for DjangoCon.
"DjangoCon '09 will be in Portland, Oregon at the DoubleTree Green Hotel between 8th and 12th September. The first 3 days
are conference days and the last 2 days are sprint days.
Keynotes will be: Ian Bicking, Ted Leung and Avi Bryant."
MAKE ART 2009 has been announced.
"make art is an international festival dedicated to the integration of
Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) in digital art.
The fourth edition of make art ? What The Fork?! distributed and open
practices in FLOSS art - will take place in Poitiers (FR), from the 7th
to the 13th of December 2009.
make art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an
exhibition, focused on the encounter between digital art and free
software."
Registration has opened for the openSUSE conference, the event will take
place on September 17-20, 2009 in Nürnberg, Germany.
"The openSUSE Conference schedule is up and registration is open!
Attending the openSUSE Conference is free, but registration is required. Lunch
will be provided, so please be sure to sign up early so we can get an
accurate headcount."
The conference schedule
for SciPy 2009 has been published, the event takes place on August 18-23
in Pasadena, CA.
"This year's program is very rich. In order to limit the number of
interesting talks that we had to turn down, we decided to reduce the
length of talks. Although this results in many short talks, we hope
that it will foster discussions, and give new ideas. Many subjects are
covered, both varying technical subject in the scientific computing
spectrum, and covering a lot of different research areas."
Eric Steuer talks with Chris Dibona in a new podcast.
"Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit
organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their
work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it
easier for people to find creative work that's been made available to
them-and the rest of the world-to use, share, reuse etc., freely and
legally. What follows is the first in a series of interviews called
"We like to share," in which Eric talked to people who work across a
variety of fields who use sharing as an approach to benefit the work
that they do.
The latest interview is with Chris Dibona, the Open Source Programs
Manager for Google."