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AnnouncementsNon-Commercial announcements Donate your unused OLPC XO to HaitiThe OLPC for Haiti project is stepping up their efforts in the wake of the recent Haitian earthquake. "If you have an unused XO laptop, you can give it to a displaced student in Haiti. OLPC for Haiti will be sending an extra shipment of XOs to Haiti this year, and the 2010 OLPCorps field volunteers in Haiti will help distribute them as part of the rebuilding around Port-au-Prince." (Thanks to Joel Young).
Commercial announcements Red Hat launches opensource.comRed Hat has created a new web site, opensource.com, to explore applying open source principles to other fields such as law, education, government, life, and so forth. The site runs on Amazon's elastic computing cloud (EC2) using RHEL, MySQL, and Drupal. "The open source way is more than a development model; it defines the characteristics of a culture. Red Hat and other open source thought leaders want to show you where open source is headed next. Tell you how to get involved. Help you apply it to your life and the world around you."
State of the Union at Red HatJim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, has posted a "State of the Union" address. "I'm kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a "State of the Union" address each January, I'd like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009."
Legal Announcements EU clears Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun MicrosystemsThe European Commission has cleared Oracle's purchase of Sun. "The Commission's investigation showed that another open source database, PostgreSQL, is considered by many database users to be a credible alternative to MySQL and could be expected to replace to some extent the competitive force currently exerted by MySQL on the database market. In addition, the Commission found that 'forks' (branches of the MySQL code base), which are legally possible given MySQL's open source nature, might also develop in future to exercise a competitive constraint on Oracle in a sufficient and timely manner." Meanwhile, opponents of Oracle's purchase, including MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius, have turned to Russia and China in an effort to block it.
Microsoft Sues TiVo - The Why of It (Groklaw)Groklaw covers the latest Microsoft patent suit. "Microsoft filed a patent infringement suit against TiVo late yesterday. Microsoft says it's really about defending AT&T, which is one of the companies TiVo has already sued over patents. TIVO says it is too. From the San Jose Business Journal: The action is seen as being related to a lawsuit that Alviso-based TiVo filed against AT&T Inc., claiming the company's U-Verse TV service illegally uses its "time-warping" technology in its digital video recorders."
Articles of interest London Stock Exchange begins migration to Linux-based trading platform (ComputerworldUK)ComputerworldUK reports on the London Stock Exchange's migration to Linux. "The exchange is gearing up for one of its most crucial years yet for technological change. At the end of the 2010, the Linux-based MillenniumIT trading platform, which the LSE gained by acquiring the Sri Lankan company for £18 million in September, will be switched on. It will replace the outgoing TradElect platform, based on Microsoft .Net architecture and upgraded by Accenture only two years ago at a cost of £40 million."
Misa Digital Guitar makes your Rock Band Peripherals feel inadequate (PCWorld)PCWorld takes a look at the Linux-based Misa Digital Guitar. "The first thing that stands out about the Misa guitar is that the traditional pickup setup that youd expect to find in the center of the guitar is replaced by an 8.4-inch 800-by-600-pixel resolution LCD touchpad. This is somewhat similar to a guitar that MUSE lead vocalist and guitarist Matthew Bellamy uses, except that on the Misa you strike the pad to hit the notes instead of strings. The touchpad is set up on an x/y coordinate pair where you will assign your desired effects."
Sun's Schwartz finished under Ellison? (The Register)The Register reports that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is thinking of quitting Sun Microsystems. "News of the exit comes as Oracle Ellison and team, along with some of Sun's executives, are scheduled to announce their strategy for Oracle and Sun products on Wednesday. The unveiling comes after European-Union regulators finally decided they were satisfied with the industry's largest database company owning MySQL."
Resources Amazon Announces Kindle Development KitAmazon has announced a beta release of its Kindle (e-book) Development Kit. "Starting next month, participants in the limited beta will be able to download the Kindle Development Kit, access developer support, test content on Kindle, and submit finished content. Those wait-listed will be invited to participate as space becomes available. The Kindle Development Kit includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops."
Novell Delivers First Integrated Toolkit for Building, Testing and Managing Software AppliancesNovell has announced the availability SUSE Appliance Toolkit. "With the availability of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, Novell now delivers the industry's most complete and integrated solution for building, testing, updating and configuring software appliances across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The Toolkit features an onsite version of Novell's innovative appliance-building solution SUSE Studio and new management tools that enable ISVs and enterprises to reduce software development time, installation cycles and maintenance costs."
Ph.D. dissertation: Low-Impact Operating System TracingMathieu Desnoyers has posted his Ph.D. dissertation as a 233-page PDF file. "In this thesis, we propose the LTTng (Linux Trace Toolkit next generation) tracer as an answer to the industry and open source community tracing needs. The low-intrusiveness of the tracer is a key aspect to its usefulness, because we need to be able to reproduce, under tracing, problems occurring in normal conditions. In some cases, users leave tracers active at all times in production, which makes the tracer overhead definitely critical."
Contests and Awards FSFE honoured with Theodor Heuss MedalThe FSFE has received the Theodor Heuss Medal. "The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) receives this year's Theodor Heuss Medal for its extraordinary work for equitable participation in the information society. Since 2001 FSFE has been committed to the freedom to use, investigate, modify and redistribute software in all parts of society and politics. Theodor Heuss Foundation states: "FSFE as a forward thinking organisation contributes to the development and establishment of rules for good global governance.""
Education and Certification Linux Foundation Launches Free Training Webinar SeriesThe Linux Foundation has launched a new webinar series. "The webinar series will feature Linux Foundation technical advisory board (TAB) members and other community developers."
Calls for Presentations GUADEC 2010 call for papersA call for papers has gone out for GUADEC 2010, submissions are due by March 20. "GUADEC (pronounced GWAH-DECK) is an acronym for the GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC is the largest get-together of GNOME users, developers, foundation leaders, individuals, governments and businesses in the world. Gnome is the Free and open source software stack that drives the user interface of many Linux-based devices, from smartphones to your home PC. This year's GUADEC in The Hague, the Netherlands, deals with several interesting themes."
OSCON 2010: Call for ProposalsA call for proposals has gone out for OSCON 2010. The event takes place on July 19-23 in Portland, OR, submissions are due by February 1. "If you have winning techniques, favorite lifesavers, war stories, productivity tips, or other ideas to share, we want to hear from you. We're especially on the look-out for ways to do more with less, design and usability best practices, mobile device innovations, cloud computing, parallelization, open standards and data, open source in government, business models, and beyond."
Upcoming Events c5t sprint announcedThe c5t sprint will be held in Dallas, TX on January 31. "About c5t: "The CMS for simple minds" -- c5t bridges mongodb, mako, and TG to bring forth a blazing-fast, easy to use, easy to modify way of storing documents and content. Yes, a CMS can be fun again!"
Agenda Posted for Red Hat's 2nd Open Source Cloud Computing ForumRed Hat has announced the agenda for the 2nd Open Source Cloud Computing Forum. "On February 10, Red Hat will present its 2nd Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, a day-long virtual forum hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. Similar to our first forum, held in July 2009, the virtual event will feature a dozen half-hour, high-impact technical presentations that cover recent developments in open source cloud computing. The presentations will provide attendees with a view of the large scope of development and deployment work that is underway today, including a look into usage scenarios. As before, we hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to work together, grow and encourage participation in the development of open source cloud computing."
EFF Experts to speak at FTC Privacy RoundtableEFF experts will speak at the upcoming FTC Privacy Roundtable in Berkeley, CA. "On Thursday, January 28, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is hosting a day-long public roundtable in Berkeley, California, exploring the privacy challenges posted by new developments in technology. Three experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are taking part."
Another set of FOSDEM interviewsThe FOSDEM conference has posted four more interviews with speakers scheduled to be at the upcoming event; the subjects this time around are David Fetter, Philip Tellis, Bernard Li, and Andrew Lewman. "The vast majority of people that tell us they use Tor are regular people. Some use it to circumvent their company firewall to get to GMail to check their calendar to see when they need to pick up their kid from soccer practice. Others use it because their country blocks access to their favorite news or comic website. Some people are worried about what ad networks may know about their browsing habits, and others about what their ISP or their favorite coffee shop owner knows about them."
Global Ignite Week reaches over 70 citiesO'Reilly has announced the Global Ignite Week. "The first annual Global Ignite Week, coming March 1-5, 2010, is gaining steam. At least 12,000 knowledge-seekers around the planet will be attending Ignite events in cities spanning six continents. Driven by the desire to share their passions and interests, volunteers are organizing Ignites in cities including Cape Town, Warsaw, Casablanca, Anchorage, Sao Paulo, New York City, Seattle, Sydney, and Bangalore. While the event originally was slated to extend across four nights, it's been expanded to five to accommodate all of the cities that want to participate."
Python Ireland Unconference announcedThe Python Ireland Unconference will be held on Feb 6, 2010 at the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics. "Python Ireland is holding its first unconference on Saturday 6th February. What is an unconference I hear you ask? An unconference is an anti-conference, it takes the most interesting bits of conferences (the hallway chat) and turns that into the entire conference. You turn up with whatever you want to talk about (or ask) and everyone there agrees the schedule. Then whatever happens after that is the unconference."
SCALE Adds Talks, Publishes ScheduleThe schedule for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 8x has been published. The conference runs February 20-21 in Los Angeles, CA, but there are also specialty sessions on Friday the 19th including "Women in open source" and "Open source software in education". In addition, there is a new session for Friday night: "Something new this year will be the 'UpSCALE' talks Friday night - SCALE's version of the O'Reilly Media 'Ignite' talks. Ignite is a style of presentation in which participants are given five minutes to speak on a subject, accompanied by 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds, and slides are automatically advanced. If you thrive on the pressure and excitement of a fast-paced presentation and have an exciting idea that you can share with the SCALE audience in 5 minutes or less then an UpSCALE talk may be perfect for you!"
Thailand MiniDebCamp 2010The Thailand MiniDebCamp 2010 has been announced. "As a follow-up to Taiwan Mini-DebConf 2009 in Taipei, we will be arranging a mini-DebCamp in Khon Kaen, Thailand, during March 13-19, 2010".
Events: February 4, 2010 to April 5, 2010The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
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