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AnnouncementsLegal Announcements Fedora trademark defense -- you can help!Red Hat legal is looking for help in defending the Fedora trademark. "Red Hat Legal is currently working on just such a defense. They've asked me to pass on a request for assistance in gathering physical evidence of our use of the Fedora logo worldwide prior to *January 30, 2007*."
Welte: More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important caseOn his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. "Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either." If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.
Articles of interest Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)Simon Phipps ponders contributor agreements, and copyright assignment policies in particular in ComputerWorld. "Even with these benefits available, there are many communities that choose not to aggregate their copyrights - notably the Linux kernel, GNOME, Apache and Mozilla communities. The recent policy and guidelines on copyright assignment by the GNOME Foundations are especially worth reading. Having diverse copyright ownership leads to a deeper mutual trust and an assurance that the playing-field remains level. Insisting on copyright aggregation is one of the more certain ways a company can ensure the open source community it is seeding remains small and lacking co-developers."
Hold The Celebrations; H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters (ComputerWorld UK)Over at ComputerWorld UK, Simon Phipps says there is nothing to celebrate in the recent announcement [PDF] that MPEG-LA will not charge royalties on "web uses" of the H.264 codec for the remaining life of the patents it administers. "First, the H.264-format video needs to be created - but that isn't free under this move. Then it needs to be served up for streaming - but that isn't free under this move. There then needs to be support for decoding it in your browser - but adding that isn't free under this move. Finally it needs to be displayed on your screen. [...] The only part of this sequence being left untaxed is the final one. Importantly, they are not offering to leave the addition of support for H.264 decoding in your browser untaxed. In particular, this means the Mozilla Foundation would have to pay to include the technology in Firefox." He also posits that MPEG-LA may try to join forces with Oracle and Paul Allen's Interval Research to create a three-way patent attack on Google—this time against WebM.
Google bails out of JavaOneIt should probably surprise nobody that Google has announced that its employees will not be attending JavaOne this year. "So were sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracles recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally."
Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)Datamation looks at Novell's third quarter financial results, which have fallen short of the company's projections. "The decline in revenues in the third quarter extended across Novell's multiple product lines, including its security-management and operating platforms, as well as its Linux business. Novell's reported revenue of $108 million for its security-management and operating platforms, down 2 percent year-over-year. Earlier this week, Novell announced a new cloud security service to manage access, identity and compliance. Novell's SUSE Linux platform products revenue in the third quarter netted $36 million, a decline of 7 percent from the third quarter of 2009. " (Thanks to Don Marti)
GCC - 'We make free software affordable' (The H)Richard Hillesley delves into the history of GCC over at the H. "GCC began life as the GNU C Compiler and achieved its first release on March 22, 1987. Michael Tiemann, who contributed as much as anyone to the later development of GCC, and who had dreamed of writing the perfect compiler, said that the day of GCC's release was "the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point).""
New Books Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior--New from O'ReillyO'Reilly has released "Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior" by Justin Cutroni.
web2py book 3rd edThe third edition of the web2py book is available from lulu.com. It's also available in PDF or html.
Resources CE Linux Forum Newsletter: August 2010The CE Linux Forum newsletter for August covers Embedded Linux Conference Europe Program Announced, LinuxCon Japan, SquashFS Support for LZO Accepted into Mainline, 34th Japan Technical Jamboree, and eLinux wiki Moving to a New Host.
Upcoming Events Program announced for Embedded Linux Conference EuropeThe program for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe has been announced. The conference will be held October 26-28 in Cambridge, UK, and will be co-located with the GStreamer conference on October 26. "The conference will host almost 50 sessions, including presentations, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, keynotes and tutorials." Some of the speakers include Ari Rauch, Ralf Baechle, Wolfram Sang, Armijn Hemel, Kevin Hillman, Wookey, Grant Likely, and Frank Rowand. Click below for the full announcement.
Linux Plumbers Conference announces opening keynote and presentationsThe Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced that Jonathan Corbet—a name that may be familiar to LWN readers—will be the opening keynote speaker at the conference. LPC will be held in Cambridge, MA November 3-5. "We're also pleased to announce that speakers have been selected for the presentation track. Click here for the full list of accepted presentations. We're very excited about this year's speaker line up, and we're equally excited about the broad range of topics proposed for the micro-conferences. It is shaping up to be an interesting and productive conference." Early bird registration ($275) ends on August 31.
Events: September 9, 2010 to November 8, 2010The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it. Audio and Video programs View Keynote and Conference Session Videos from LinuxCon 2010Videos from all of the keynotes sessions and a number of conference sessions from LinuxCon 2010 are now available to everyone for viewing. Registration is required.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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