Announcements

Brief items

VP8 and MPEG LA (WebM blog)

Google and the MPEG Licensing Authority have announced an agreement that will stop MPEG LA from creating a patent pool around the VP8 video codec, the WebM blog reports. VP8 is part of the royalty-free WebM media file format; MPEG LA has been threatening to create a patent pool to change the "royalty-free" part. "The arrangement with MPEG LA and 11 patent owners grants a license to Google and allows Google to sublicense any techniques that may be essential to VP8 and are owned by the patent owners; we may sublicense those techniques to any VP8 user on a royalty-free basis. The techniques may be used in any VP8 product, whether developed by Google or a third party or based on Google's libvpx implementation or a third-party implementation of the VP8 data format specification. It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec."

Comments (49 posted)

Articles of interest

Open Source at CeBIT 2013 (The H)

The H reports from CeBIT 2013 at length. "Speaking to me following his presentation, [Klaus] Knopper also mentioned that he was contemplating creating a mobile version of Knoppix to run on smartphones. The developer noted that the hardware he would need is already available in many smartphones: a powerful processor, 1GB or more of RAM, and a large, high-resolution screen. He showed us his Samsung Galaxy Note II running the latest version of the CyanogenMod Project's custom Android firmware and suggested that Knoppix would run very well on the hardware and could be useful for applications such as GIMP (the Note II includes a pressure-sensitive stylus and Wacom technologies). Phones like the Note II could also be docked for use with an external display, keyboard and mouse, turning them into fully fledged desktop devices."

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R.I.P. LinuxDevices… Long live LinuxGizmos!

Rick Lehrbaum, founder of LinuxDevices, has a new site called LinuxGizmos. "Like its forerunner, LinuxGizmos is devoted to the use of Linux in embedded and mobile devices and applications. The site’s goal is to provide daily updates of news and information on embedded Linux distributions, application software, development tools, protocols, standards, and hardware of interest to technical, marketing, and management professionals in the embedded and mobile devices markets."

Comments (6 posted)

Upcoming Events

Events: March 14, 2013 to May 13, 2013

The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.

Date(s)	Event	Location
March 13 March 21	PyCon 2013	Santa Clara, CA, US
March 15 March 16	Open Source Conference	Szczecin, Poland
March 15 March 17	German Perl Workshop	Berlin, Germany
March 16 March 17	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2013	Chemnitz, Germany
March 19 March 21	FLOSS UK Large Installation Systems Administration	Newcastle-upon-Tyne , UK
March 20 March 22	Open Source Think Tank	Calistoga, CA, USA
March 23	Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2013	Augsburg, Germany
March 23 March 24	LibrePlanet 2013: Commit Change	Cambridge, MA, USA
March 25	Ignite LocationTech Boston	Boston, MA, USA
March 30	Emacsconf	London, UK
March 30	NYC Open Tech Conference	Queens, NY, USA
April 1 April 5	Scientific Software Engineering Conference	Boulder, CO, USA
April 4 April 5	Distro Recipes	Paris, France
April 4 April 7	OsmoDevCon 2013	Berlin, Germany
April 6 April 7	international Openmobility conference 2013	Bratislava, Slovakia
April 8	The CentOS Dojo 2013	Antwerp, Belgium
April 8 April 9	Write The Docs	Portland, OR, USA
April 10 April 13	Libre Graphics Meeting	Madrid, Spain
April 10 April 13	Evergreen ILS 2013	Vancouver, Canada
April 14	OpenShift Origin Community Day	Portland, OR, USA
April 15 April 17	Open Networking Summit	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 15 April 17	LF Collaboration Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 15 April 18	OpenStack Summit	Portland, OR, USA
April 17 April 18	Open Source Data Center Conference	Nuremberg, Germany
April 17 April 19	IPv6 Summit	Denver, CO, USA
April 18 April 19	Linux Storage, Filesystem and MM Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 19	Puppet Camp	Nürnberg, Germany
April 22 April 25	Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 26	MySQL® & Cloud Database Solutions Day	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 27 April 28	LinuxFest Northwest	Bellingham, WA, USA
April 27 April 28	WordCamp Melbourne 2013	Melbourne, Australia
April 29 April 30	Open Source Business Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 29 April 30	2013 European LLVM Conference	Paris, France
May 1 May 3	DConf 2013	Menlo Park, CA, USA
May 9 May 12	Linux Audio Conference 2013	Graz, Austria

If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.

Page editor: Rebecca Sobol