Brief items
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced a new patent reform
project called "Defend Innovation". "
EFF has posted seven proposals for software patent reform
at Defendinnovation.org, including shortening the term for
software patents from 20 years to no more than five years,
allowing winning parties in litigation to recover fees and
costs, and ensuring that infringers who arrive at a
patented idea independently aren't held liable, for
example. EFF is asking the public to sign on to the
proposals and to make additional comments of their own.
Additionally, we're calling on individual inventors,
lawyers, and academics to give feedback, and we're asking
technology companies to continue the conversation with
in-person meetings with EFF staff. EFF will take the
results from these comments and meetings and create a
whitepaper to help educate lawmakers and others about the
full reach of the problem and next steps forward to fix it."
Full Story (comments: 29)
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has started an initiative to
advance fair public procurements in Finland. "
The initiative concentrates
on IT related procurement notices that require brand instead of defining
functionalities required by the procurer. To date FSFE has skimmed over
300 procurement notices, and of those taken into closer analysis, 14
have been found to clearly violate the Finnish procurement law. These
violating notices explicitly asked for tenders of specific brands of
software manufacturers or products and thus discriminate all other
brands and manufacturers, effectively stopping free competition."
Full Story (comments: none)
Linux.com has
the videos
from LinuxCon Japan, which was held earlier this month. (Thanks to Shawn Landden)
Comments (7 posted)
The Linux Foundation has announced 5 new Silver members: Adeneo, Feuerlabs, Omnibond, STEC and Synopsys.
Full Story (comments: none)
Articles of interest
On her blog, Máirín Duffy has written about four separate talks from the
USENIX Women in Advanced Computing 2012 Summit. Included are talks from
Leslie Lambert, Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer, Juniper Networks;
Emily Gladstone Cole, Operations Architect, Cisco Systems, Inc.;
Clea Zolotow, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM; and
Sabrina Farmer, Site Reliabity Engineer, Google Inc. The write-ups are quite thorough and interesting. From Farmer: "
In Gmail, if something goes wrong, it’s in the news. You’re responsible for hundreds of millions of people’s email on that team. Her first press interview for Gmail was terrifying, but amazing. The next reporter asked for her by name. Having an outage in the NY Times would be really bad – it’s a very high risk position. You can’t, however, have success without failure – you won’t grow if you don’t fail along the way. It’s how you handle that failure that matters. The worst thing that can happen when you fail is probably not as bad as you think."
Comments (5 posted)
New Books
Lars Wirzenius has released his ebook
Getting Things Done For Hackers under the CC-BY-SA
3.0 license. "
David Allen's "Getting Things Done", or GTD for short, is a popular,
powerful system for managing one's life. If you have trouble dealing
with your e-mail inbox, or feel you're drowning under a flood of inputs
and information, or just don't seem to have time to do everything you
think you should be doing, or others want you to do, then GTD may be a
good thing for you to consider.
This book explains how I, a computer geek, have implemented it in my own
life. It is aimed at everyone whose lives include a lot of computer use,
and who know how to use their computers."
Full Story (comments: none)
O'Reilly Media has released "YUI 3 Cookbook" by Evan Goer.
Full Story (comments: none)
Education and Certification
The folks at Free Electrons have
announced the release of their Android training materials under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 license. "
Our course targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android, customizing Android to support specific hardware and product requirements." See
the course agenda [PDF] for details on the covered material.
Comments (none posted)
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced the completion of the
beta test for its new Linux Essentials exam. "
The Linux Essentials exam will be available at the end of June 2012 in
Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in other nations around the world
in 2013."
Full Story (comments: none)
Calls for Presentations
FOSS.IN is back by popular demand. FOSS.IN is one of India's oldest and
best-known annual international technology events. Although there was no
2011 conference, it will be back for 2012 in Bangalore, India, November
29-December 1. The call for participation is currently open till July 8th.
Full Story (comments: 1)
The openSUSE Summit takes place September 21-23, 2012 in Orlando, Florida.
The call for papers
deadline has been extended until June 30.
Comments (none posted)
Upcoming Events
PyCon Australia will take place August 18-19, 2012 in Hobart, Tasmania.
The program has been announced. "
Our keynote presenters, Mark Ramm,
Engineering Manager on Juju at Canonical, and Kenneth Reitz, Python lead at
Heroku will be joined by a wide array of presenters covering a broad range
of backgrounds, including industry, research, government and academia."
Full Story (comments: none)
Events: June 21, 2012 to August 20, 2012
The following event listing is taken from the
LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
June 19 June 21 |
Solutions Linux Open Source |
Paris, France |
June 20 June 21 |
Open Source Summit (NASA, State Dept, VA) |
College Park, MD, USA |
June 26 June 29 |
Open Source Bridge: The conference for open source citizens |
Portland, Oregon, USA |
June 26 July 2 |
GNOME & Mono Festival of Love 2012 |
Boston, MA, USA |
June 30 July 1 |
Quack And Hack 2012 |
Paoli, PA, USA |
June 30 July 6 |
Akademy (KDE conference) 2012 |
Tallinn, Estonia |
July 1 July 7 |
DebConf 2012 |
Managua, Nicaragua |
July 2 July 8 |
EuroPython 2012 |
Florence, Italy |
| July 5 |
London Lua user group |
London, UK |
July 6 July 8 |
3. Braunschweiger Atari & Amiga Meeting |
Braunschweig, Germany |
July 7 July 8 |
10th European Tcl/Tk User Meeting |
Munich, Germany |
July 7 July 12 |
Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre |
Geneva, Switzerland |
July 8 July 14 |
DebConf12 |
Managua, Nicaragua |
July 9 July 11 |
GNU Tools Cauldron 2012 |
Prague, Czech Republic |
July 10 July 11 |
AdaCamp Washington, DC |
Washington, DC, USA |
July 10 July 15 |
Wikimania |
Washington, DC, USA |
| July 11 |
PuppetCamp Geneva @RMLL/LSM |
Geneva, Switzerland |
July 11 July 13 |
Linux Symposium |
Ottawa, Canada |
July 14 July 15 |
Community Leadership Summit 2012 |
Portland, OR, USA |
July 16 July 20 |
OSCON |
Portland, OR, USA |
July 26 July 29 |
GNOME Users And Developers European Conference |
A Coruña, Spain |
August 3 August 4 |
Texas Linux Fest |
San Antonio, TX, USA |
August 8 August 10 |
21st USENIX Security Symposium |
Bellevue, WA, USA |
August 18 August 19 |
PyCon Australia 2012 |
Hobart, Tasmania |
If your event does not appear here, please
tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol