The Free Software Foundation has laid
down a challenge to Google in the form of an open letter. "With
your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site
(YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec --
VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an
irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube?
You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and
proprietary software (Flash)."
Andy Updegrove reports
that Jacobsen v. Katzer (the JMRI case) has been settled on terms which
uphold the enforceability of free software licenses in the US. "With
the case now settled, there can be no further appeals - meaning that the
rulings of the District and Appeals courts are now binding in their
circuit. Although federal courts in other circuits will not be bound this
court's decision, the California circuit is well respected, and other
federal judges nationwide will be influenced by its legal conclusions. As
a result, the results of the Jacobsen v. Katzer could eventually become the
law of the land."
The Irish Times covers
a study about hackers in films. "Also, the vast majority of hackers
in films are actually portrayed as the good guys - a huge 73 per cent, with
10 per cent being somewhere in between, and 17 per cent portrayed as bad
guys. "I was definitely surprised at the number of films showing hackers in
a positive light," [Damian Gordon] says." (Thanks to John Britton)
The
LAC Times
has been launched.
"I'm pleased to announce the first edition of the LAC Times, a newsletter
as a prelude to the Linux Audio Conference 2010.
We intend to release a new edition roughly every month with news, backgrounds
and announcements regarding the Linux Audio Conference in May."
The February, 2010 edition of the Linux Foundation Newsletter has been published.
"In this month's Linux Foundation newsletter:
* Linux Foundation Hosts MeeGo Project
* Free Linux Training Webinar Series Announced
* New Collaboration Summit Program Details Revealed
* 2010 "We're Linux" Video Contest Launches
* Linux Foundation in the News
* Upcoming Training Course from Linux Foundation".
Joel Spolsky has put together an extensive Mercurial tutorial with lots of examples and a humorous approach. "Finally, if you havent collapsed yet from exhaustion, before I finish this tutorial, I just want to show you one more tiny thing: you can use the hg update command to go backwards or forwards in time to any revision you want. Well, you cant really go into the future per se, although that would be super-cool. If you only had four revisions you would just hg update -r 103994 and get some really cool anti-gravity sci-fi futuristic version of your source code. But of course, that is not possible."
Opensource.com talks
with Karsten Wade about the project to write The Open Source Way, a
book on creating communities. "The chapter that has me most excited
and the one I want to dive into now that I have some breathing room is
Business the open source way. There is potential to write some
groundbreaking, new content here to identify practices that people haven't
thought of in that way before. There is also an even greater chance to make
one canonical location for references and learning derived from the best
books and the best minds about applying these principles to
business."
The Arduino open hardware microprocessor
project is conducting an online
Usage Survey.
"We're looking to gather data about how you use the Arduino hardware, software, and website. This survey should take about five to ten minutes. Please share it with all the Arduino users you know, so we can get a broad view of how you're using it."
Here's a survey of Linux video players on Linux.com. "The video support for VLC on Linux is outstanding. If you can't watch it in VLC, odds are you can't watch it. Note that VLC also boasts support for quite a few subtitle and captioning formats, so it may be the best option for users who need or want subtitles with their video for accessibility reasons or just because they want to be able to watch their dialog."
use Perl has announced the call for papers for the 12th German Perl Workshop 2010.
"The 12th German Perl Workshop will be hosted from June 7th to 9th 2010 in Schorndorf near Stuttgart. The workshop is targeted towards all experienced and beginning Perl developers.
Obviously, the workshop is only as good as its talks your talks. We are interested in all talks about Perl itself or about Perl related topics, and especially talks that would apply to this year's motto Modern Perl. The submission deadline for your 5, 20 or 40 minute talks has been extended until March 5th, 2010."
A call for participation has gone out for RailsConf.
"Sebastopol, CA, February 18, 2010 - This year's RailsConf
offers the Rails community
the opportunity to delve into the possibilities created by the Rails 3 release. O'Reilly Media and
Ruby Central, Inc. have opened registration for RailsConf on June 7-10, 2010, at the Baltimore
Convention Center in Baltimore, MD. To ensure that the program includes the most timely content
possible, the call for participation remains open until March 17, 2010."
The preliminary program agenda for the 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit has been announced. The summit will be held in
San Francisco, CA on April 14-16, 2010.
"The Collaboration Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only gathering of
the brightest minds in Linux, including core kernel developers,
distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other
community organizations. It is the only conference designed to
accelerate collaboration and encourage solutions by bringing together
a true cross-section of leaders to meet face-to-face to tackle and
solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today."
The next OpenOffice.org Conference has been announced, the call for papers
will happen soon.
"The OpenOffice.org community today announced the date for its
anniversary OpenOffice.org Conference. This OOoCon in the year of the
project's 10th birthday, will take place from August 31st to September
3rd in Budapest, Hungary."
The PostgreSQL Conference East talks have been announced.
"The PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. team is pleased to announce the current
list of talks for PostgreSQL Conference East. Being held in Philadelphia
from March 25th through March 28th, PostgreSQL Conference East is the
PostgreSQL Conference for Developers, Users and Decision Makers who want
to learn and network with all that is PostgreSQL.
The list of talks can be found
here."