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AnnouncementsNon-Commercial announcements End Software Patents collecting names of on-the-fence decision makersEnd Software Patents is anticipating the US Supreme Court decision in the Bilski case and is collecting names of people that would be good to send a copy of Patent Absurdity to. End Software Patents executive director Ciarán O'Riordan writes: "Sending it to people firmly on one side or the other won't do anything, so Gates and Stallman won't get a copy, but who are the politicians, company decision makers, professors, and organisation representatives who either haven't taken a stance, or who lean in our direction and might do some internal lobbying if they got some encouragement?"
Commercial announcements ADempiere Business Consultants announcedThe leading implementers of the free and open source ERP application ADempiere have announced the launch of ADempiere Business Consultants (ABC). "A limited partnership, ADempiere Business Consultants LLP, has been established in the England, United Kingdom (www.adempiereconsultants.com). The partnership will act as a hub for the accelerated development of partner shared knowledge including best practise in evaluation, implementation and support."
Articles of interest Google pounds the open standards drum during I/O keynote (ars technica)Ars technica reports in from Google's developer conference, Google I/O. "Sundar Pichai, Google VP of product management, discussed the growing importance of the Web as an application platform. HTML5 is gaining traction swiftly, he said, and is poised to bring a multitude of rich new capabilities to the Web. Pichai showed graphs that quantified the increasing support for HTML5 features in mainstream browsers, including Google's own Chrome. Web APIs for multimedia, filesystem interaction, geolocation, and support for hardware accelerated rendering have arrived, bringing the promise of a new generation of more sophisticated Web applications."
Newly open source BitTorrent protocol aims to unclog tubes (ars technica)ars technica covers the open source release of BitTorrent's uTorrent Transport Protocol (uTP). "uTP, which is used today in the popular uTorrent BitTorrent client, is designed to reduce network congestion by allowing other traffic to take precedence. This reduces the overall load that BitTorrent puts on networks, both locally and at the ISP level. The developers contend that the new protocol will remove the need for ISPs to throttle or block BitTorrent traffic and could also potentially boost download performance in some cases."
WebM: Missing The Assurances Open Source Needs? (ComputerWorld)Simon Phipps expresses some concerns about WebM in ComputerWorld UK. "Firstly, the new license Google is using for the project is one that's not been submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval. As it stands it possibly can't be approved due to Google's ironic inclusion of a 'field of use' restriction in the patent grant (which is restricted to 'this implementation of VP8' rather than the more general grant in the Apache license from which the text started). That means WebM is not currently open source, despite using a license based on the BSD and Apache licenses."
Is Android fragmented or is this the new rate of innovation? (Engadget)Engadget takes on the "Android fragmentation" issue. "Android isn't summer camp for handset vendors and not everyone gets get a trophy for showing up. Google is treating partners equally, but will not slow the rate of innovation so weaker players can keep up. By constantly raising the bar, both in terms of reference devices and software, Google aims to keep innovating and drive that innovation as a differentiator."
Hacking through the Software Patent Thickets (The H)The H looks at patent thickets and why they are a problem for free software. "Probably the vast majority of patents are granted for very specific aspects of a given field. On their own, they do nothing; to be useful, they must be employed alongside many other patented ideas. But that is only possible if all of the relevant patent-holders agree: if even one element is missing, the machine or process might fail. As technology becomes more complex, it becomes dependent on an increasing number of patent-holders, all of which must license their inventions for the system to function."
Open source robot is all eyes (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices looks at Qbo robot. "A startup called TheCorpora is readying an open source Linux robot based on a Mini-ITX board with an Intel Atom and an Nvidia Ion GPU. The foot-and-a-half tall Qbo lacks arms or legs, but is mobile, can be controlled via WiFi, and offers stereoscopic face, object, and gesture recognition, plus speech synthesis and voice recognition."
Mueller: German high court declares all software potentially patentableFlorian Mueller looks at a decision of the highest German appeals court that overrules a lower patent court ruling that struck down a patent. This ruling—about a Siemens patent, not the recent upholding of a Microsoft FAT patent—was made on April 22 and the decision has now been made public. "This ruling has very general implications and ramifications. It's not just about that one case. This decision has the effect that in Germany, a country in which software patents were previously only considered valid under relatively strict criteria, all software ideas are now potentially patentable as long as they are innovative from a purely formal point of view, meaning they're at least marginally different from how a technical problem was solved before. There are many such patents that the European Patent Office and national patent offices have granted, and those are now more enforceable than ever." (Thanks to Max Hyre.)
Bids for Novell Expected This Week (WSJ)The Wall Street Journal has a brief article stating that Novell is entertaining offers from potential buyers. "As many as 20 companies have expressed interest in Novell, according to people familiar with the matter. Most, if not all, of the companies expected to lodge serious bids are private equity firms."
Glaxo Tries a Linux Approach (Wall Street Journal)The Wall Street Journal looks at an effort by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to "open source" 13,500 chemical compounds that may inhibit the malaria parasite. "Glaxo and others hope that sharing information and working together will lead scientists to come up with a drug for treating the mosquito-borne disease faster than the company could on its own. Other researchers 'may look at these structures in quite a different way and see something that we don't,' said Nick Cammack, head of Glaxo's Medicines Development Campus in Spain. [...] The move is one of the largest experiments yet by the pharmaceutical industry to apply techniques of open-source development to drug discovery, based on the idea that collaboration by volunteers will create products that aren't owned by a single company." Of course, the fly in the ointment (so to speak) may still be something that open source software is struggling with: patents.
Interviews Fedora's Paul Frields: Leadership, trust, fail early and often (opensource.com)Opensource.com talks with Paul Frields. "Being a community leader means being willing to give away all credit, shoulder all blame, and generally suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It also means you have to actively look for the many success stories happening every day, especially in a large community effort. Telling those stories to a wider audience rightfully gives community members a greater sense of ownership and pride in what they do, and it can be both motivating and energizing for the right people."
Education and Certification LPI at LinuxTag 2010, Berlin, Germany: "Jobcorner", Exam labs and WorkshopsThe Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced its participation in this year's LinuxTag conference (June 9-12, 2010 in Berlin, Germany). LPI will be hosting a Jobcorner, exam labs and workshops.
Calls for Presentations Linux Security Summit 2010 - Announcement and CFPThe Linux Security Summit will take place August 9, 2010, in Boston, MA. The call for presentations closes June 4, 2010. "The Linux Security Summit is a technical forum for collaboration between Linux developers, researchers, and end users. Its primary aim is to foster community efforts in analyzing and solving Linux security challenges."
Upcoming Events The Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon 2010 Program and Schedule (EarthTimes)EarthTimes has the Linux Foundation's press release announcing new keynote speakers and the full conference schedule for LinuxCon North America. The event takes place August 10-12, 2010 in Boston, MA, USA.
Events: June 3, 2010 to August 2, 2010The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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