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AnnouncementsNon-Commercial announcements OpenOffice.org community members launch the Document FoundationA group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of The Document Foundation, intended to carry forward development of OpenOffice.org as an independent free software project. "Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand 'LibreOffice' has been chosen for the software going forward." Supporting organizations include Canonical, Google, Novell, and Red Hat.
XtreemOS Announces Public Access to Open Test BedThe XtreemOS consortium has announced the opening of a publicly accessible test bed for the XtreemOS grid operating system. "XtreemOS is a set of technologies developed on top of Mandriva Linux to enable ease of use on clusters and grids. XtreemOS has been developed over the past 4 years by an international consortium of 19 academic and industrial partners. When asked why the consortium decided to open their test bed, Dr. Christine Morin, a research director at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Infomatique et Automatique) replied, "We wanted to concretely demonstrate our efforts over the past four years, as well as to seek interest from other computer researchers and scientists to participate in the future development of XtreemOS." Dr Morin organized and has been the scientific coordinator for the XtreemOS project since its inception in 2006."
Commercial announcements Red Hat Reports Second Quarter ResultsRed Hat has announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter ended August 31, 2010. "Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year."
Legal Announcements Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on BilskiThe Red Hat legal team has submitted comments to the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. "The submission was made in response to the PTO's request for public comments to assist it in determining how to apply the Supreme Court's decision in that case. Although the Bilski decision did not expressly address the standards for refusing to allow software patents, interpretation of the decision will determine whether certain patents are granted. Thus the PTO's approach to examining patent applications will have a substantial effect on the patent landscape. Red Hat previously submitted an amicus brief in Bilski. Its comments to the PTO indicate its continuing commitment to reform of the patent system to address the harms caused by poor quality software patents." (Thanks to Davide Del Vento)
Articles of interest The Defenders of Free Software (New York Times)Here's a profile of Armijn Hemel and his GPL enforcement work in the New York Times. "Lawsuits are typically settled out of court. For example, after Cisco was sued over the software included in its home routers; it agreed to make the software code available, tapped a point person to be responsible for open-source issues and paid an undisclosed amount to settle the case. Representatives of companies dealing with these complaints say it's a far more amicable engagement than one would find in the proprietary software world, where hard-charging lawyers come seeking serious payback for what they view as violations of intellectual property rules."
Can academia "release early, release often?" (opensource.com)Over at opensource.com, Fedora project member and Red Hat intern Ian Weller reflects on what was learned in a project to create an open source textbook, Practical Open Source Software Exploration. In particular, he notes the difference between the release cycles in open source and academia. "Here's where we again saw the gap between the release cycles of open source and those in academia. The open source release cycle is 'release early, release often'—even though your goals are known, milestones are often unknown, and it's possible that even the end result is unknown. Professors know when every milestone—every semester—begins and ends, and students know exactly what they're going to learn in a given semester, but they don't always know what the end goal is."
Project Porting MeeGo OS To Android Phones Starting To Yield Results (Android Police)The Android Police site reports that a group of developers is getting to the point where it is possible to run MeeGo on a Nexus One handset. "Right now, itÂ’s unclear exactly how functional the OS is, and, as usual, the development is suffering from issues with driver cross-compatibility and other similar obstacles. One particular stumbling block appears to be the closed-source nature of Qualcomm 3D drivers, preventing hardware acceleration of the user interface and resulting in painfully slow response times."
CodePlex Foundation becomes Outercurve Foundation (The H)The H reports that the CodePlex Foundation has changed its name to the Outercurve Foundation. "Since its launch, the CodePlex Foundation has been confused by some with Microsoft's CodePlex.com project hosting platform, despite the fact that the former is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open source collaboration between corporations and the community and the latter is a Microsoft-owned site for hosting open source projects." LWN covered the launch of the CodePlex Foundation in September 2009.
New Books The Agile Samurai--New from Pragmatic BookshelfPragmatic Bookshelf has released "The Agile Samurai" by Jonathan Rasmusson.
REST in Practice--New from O'ReillyO'Reilly has released "REST in Practice" by Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson.
Calls for Presentations Southern Plumbers Miniconf CFP (LCA 2011 - Brisbane)There will be a Southern Plumbers Miniconf at the 2011 linux.conf.au on January 24, 2011, in Brisbane, Australia. The call for submissions will be open until October 29, 2010.
Call for proposals -- PyCon 2011PyCon 2011 will be held March 9-17, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. "The PyCon conference days will be March 11-13, preceded by two tutorial days (March 9-10), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 14-17)." The call for proposals for the formal presentation tracks is open until November 10, 2010.
Upcoming Events Open Video Conference streamed live in WebMFlumotion will be streaming the Open Video Conference live using the open formats WebM and Ogg / Vorbis / Theora. "The OVC is an annual summit organized and hosted by the Open Video Alliance (OVA), a coalition of organizations and individuals committed to the idea that the power of moving image should belong to everyone. This year's OVC takes place between 1-2 October in New York City, with the conference drawing a broad and unique audience of connected creatives and change makers, who all share the vision of an open video ecosystem."
Events: October 7, 2010 to December 6, 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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