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*."
On 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.
The 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.
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."
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.
It 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."
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)
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).""
The 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.
The 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.
Videos 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.