Non-Commercial announcements
The Fedora Project has extended the deadlines for Summer Coding 2010.
"
We have pushed back the first part of the Summer Coding 2010
schedule. There wasn't enough time to find sponsors. Now there is more
time for mentors and students to generate ideas and write up good
proposals, while people like you and me look for more sponsors." The
deadlines have been extended by one month.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that CiviCRM has earned its
recommendation as a fully featured donor and contact management system
for nonprofits. "
The FSF had highlighted the need for a free software
solution in this area as part of its High Priority Projects campaign.
With this
announcement, the FSF will also be adopting CiviCRM for its own use, and
actively encouraging other nonprofit organizations to do the same."
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Commercial announcements
Synaptics has
announced
Synaptics Gesture Suite Linux (SGS-L), which offers multi-touch support. "
SGS-L was developed from analyzing the most common workflows, from entertainment activities such as viewing photos and listening to music, to productivity activities such as accessing emails and presentations. The result is an enhanced usability model that makes it intuitive for consumers to easily understand and discover features, resulting in a better user experience."
Comments (1 posted)
Articles of interest
As seen in
this
ITWorld article, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is
currently contemplating new rules for disclosure around the offering of
asset-backed securities. The proposal,
a monster PDF
file, reads: "
We are proposing to require the filing of a
computer program (the 'waterfall computer program,' as defined in the
proposed rule) of the contractual cash flow provisions of the securities in
the form of downloadable source code in Python, a commonly used computer
programming language that is open source and interpretive." There
are all kinds of interesting implications, including effects on the
language, security, and more.
Comments (46 posted)
InformationWeek
reports from the kernel panel discussion at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. "
Andrew Morton, a key aide to Linux lead developer Linus Torvalds and often referred to as the 'Colonel of the kernel,' put the issue equally bluntly: 'Yes, we're getting older, and we're getting more tired. I don't see people jumping with enthusiasm to work on things the way that I used to.'
But he added that meant the developers in the kernel process had gained deep knowledge of the code they're working with and are willing to tackle greater complexity in making additions."
Comments (11 posted)
Bruce Byfield
talks
with Aaron Seigo about the future of KDE. "
According to Seigo,
the large-scale changes that began two years ago with the release of KDE
4.0 are mostly complete now. "We've reached the stage with the 4.4 release
that happened in January where we've got this nice feature set on the
desktop and we have applications available for it and some nice refinements
in the look and feel. That's where we are. But where are we going? That's
always the difficult question. Once you've arrived at a place,what are you
going to aim for?" Seigo's answer to his own question is that KDE is
currently moving in three directions: adding functionality to the desktop
in both small features and within specific applications, extending the
concept of the social desktop, and the introduction of KDE on to every
possible hardware platform. Each is a small story in itself."
Comments (74 posted)
The H
looks
at Oracle's plans for MySQL. "
Oracle presented a beta of what it
called a "much faster" MySQL at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and insists
it will be continuing to invest in the open source database. Oracle's Chief
Corporate Architect, Edward Screven, presented the beta version of MySQL
5.5 which will now use InnoDB as its default storage engine, saying that
the switch offers a 200% performance improvement and over ten times faster
recovery times. He assured the audience that despite the switch to Oracle's
InnoDB, Oracle will be maintaining the pluggable storage engine
architecture and that the company would continue to ship the same code base
in the community and enterprise editions." (Thanks to Raji Ramsharma)
Comments (48 posted)
Sean Michael Kerner
covers
a Collaboration Summit keynote by Dan Frye, vice president of open
system development at IBM. "
For IBM, one of the hardest lessons it
had to learn was one about control. Mainly, there is none. "There is
nothing that we can do to control individuals or communities, and if you
try, you make thing worse," Frye told the audience. "What you need is
influence. It goes back to the most important lesson, which is to give back
to the community and develop expertise. You'll find that if your developers
are working with a community, that over time they'll develop influence and
that influence will allow you to get things done.""
Comments (1 posted)
Ryan Paul
reports
on the Python GNOME hackfest. "
Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project."
Comments (none posted)
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier
looks
at the missing elements from Summer of Code. "
I bring up documentation, but really the problem that I see is that the Summer programs are simply too code- and developer-centric. Projects and companies in this space should also be thinking about involving translators, user interface designers, artists, and other disciplines in their projects. Not only because it would help these projects be more well-rounded and address areas outside of just developing code, but because it would also provide a wonderful opportunity for cross-pollination. Students who are pursuing other fields of study would provide an opportunity to inform and enthuse ambassadors for open source who move in different circles. It would do open source projects worlds of good to have articulate and interested participants who could carry open source ideals to their peers in other disciplines."
Comments (12 posted)
Contests and Awards
Linux.com has
announced
the winners of this year's We're Linux Video Contest. First place: Go
Linux, Second place: Create Something Unique, and Third place: Linux: Free
Your Computer.
Comments (none posted)
ODBMS.ORG has announced that it will issue the "Best Object Databases
Lecture Notes" Award 2010, "
for the most complete and up to date
lecture notes on Object Databases, that have been, or have strong potential
to be, instrumental to the teaching of theory and practice in the field of
object database systems." Submissions will be accepted until June
4, 2010.
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Calls for Presentations
Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) takes place May 27-30, 2010 in Brussels,
Belgium. The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2010.
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The Flash Memory Summit takes place August 17-19, 2010 in Santa Clara,
California. The call for proposals is open until May 7, 2010.
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This year's KVM Forum takes place August 9-10, 2010 (colocated with
LinuxCon) in Boston, Massachusetts. Abstracts are due by May 14, 2010.
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Upcoming Events
The program for Linux Audio Conference 2010 has been
posted. LAC 2010
takes place May 1-4, 2010 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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The Linux Audio Conference 2010 will have live streaming coverage of all the paper presentations and selected workshops. "
for remote participants,
there is an IRC channel called #lac2010 on irc.freenode.net, which serves
as a backchannel for your questions and comments, hangout for conference
chatter, and helpdesk for any streaming troubles you might encounter."
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Events: April 29, 2010 to June 28, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the
LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
April 25 April 29 |
Interop Las Vegas |
Las Vegas, NV, USA |
April 28 April 29 |
Xen Summit North America at AMD |
Sunnyvale, CA, USA |
| April 29 |
Patents and Free and Open Source Software |
Boulder, CO, USA |
May 1 May 2 |
OggCamp |
Liverpool, England |
May 1 May 2 |
Devops Down Under |
Sydney, Australia |
May 1 May 4 |
Linux Audio Conference |
Utrecht, NL |
May 3 May 6 |
Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco |
San Francisco, CA, USA |
May 3 May 7 |
SambaXP 2010 |
Göttingen, Germany |
| May 6 |
NLUUG spring conference: System Administration |
Ede, The Netherlands |
May 7 May 8 |
Professional IT Community Conference |
New Brunswick, NJ, USA |
May 7 May 9 |
Pycon Italy |
Firenze, Italy |
May 10 May 14 |
Ubuntu Developer Summit |
Brussels, Belgium |
May 17 May 21 |
Fourth African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons |
Accra, Ghana |
May 18 May 21 |
PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers |
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
May 24 May 25 |
Netbook Summit |
San Francisco, CA, USA |
May 24 May 26 |
DjangoCon Europe |
Berlin, Germany |
May 24 May 30 |
Plone Symposium East 2010 |
State College, PA, USA |
May 27 May 30 |
Libre Graphics Meeting |
Brussels, Belgium |
June 1 June 4 |
Open Source Bridge |
Portland, Oregon, USA |
June 3 June 4 |
Athens IT Security Conference |
Athens, Greece |
June 7 June 9 |
German Perl Workshop 2010 |
Schorndorf, Germany |
June 7 June 10 |
RailsConf 2010 |
Baltimore, MD, USA |
June 9 June 11 |
PyCon Asia Pacific 2010 |
Singapore, Singapore |
June 9 June 12 |
LinuxTag |
Berlin, Germany |
June 10 June 11 |
Mini-DebConf at LinuxTag 2010 |
Berlin, Germany |
June 12 June 13 |
SouthEast Linux Fest |
Spartanburg, SC, USA |
June 15 June 16 |
Middle East and Africa Open Source Software Technology Forum |
Cairo, Egypt |
| June 19 |
FOSSCon |
Rochester, New York, USA |
June 21 June 25 |
Semantic Technology Conference 2010 |
San Francisco, CA, USA |
June 22 June 25 |
Red Hat Summit |
Boston, USA |
June 23 June 24 |
Open Source Data Center Conference 2010 |
Nuremberg, Germany |
June 26 June 27 |
PyCon Australia |
Sydney, Australia |
If your event does not appear here, please
tell us about it.
Audio and Video programs
For anybody who is not yet convinced about the fundamental nature of software patents:
Patent Absurdity is a 30-minute film containing interviews with Karen Sandler, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, and others. It is available in Ogg Theora format, naturally.
Comments (64 posted)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol