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Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
OSDL pays Linus's legal bills
The Open Source Development Lab has sent out a press release stating that it will be picking up the tab for Linus Torvalds' legal representation in the SCO case. OSDL will also pay for representation for any other employees who get caught up in SCO's lawsuits.
The Public Sector Open Source Project
The Public Sector Open Source Project is a cooperative effort between Massachusetts and MIT; its purpose is to encourage the use and creation of free software for governmental use. The project is launching with a meeting in Cambridge, Mass. on December 9; the organizers are looking for state and local government representatives who are interested in attending.
theKompany.com: Rekall Now Available Under GPL
KDE.News has an announcement concerning a license change on the Rekall project. "theKompany.com has just announced that Rekall, the rapid application development database tool for Linux, similar in concept to MS Access, has been released under the GPL. Rekall can be built with KDE3 support as well as Qt-only."
Commercial announcements
CyberGuard Acquires SnapGear
CyberGuard Corporation has announced that the company has signed an agreement to acquire the embedded Linux company SnapGear. SnapGear's engineering team might be best known to LWN readers for their role in developing uClinux.
Gateway selling SUSE-installed servers
Here, finally, is Gateway's press release regarding its deal with SUSE. "The new alliance with SUSE, a leading provider of Linux software and services, further strengthens Gateway's commitment to enterprise customers, creating a single point of purchase, support and maintenance for SUSE LINUX Standard Server 8 and SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 operating systems."
JBoss Group goes for indemnification
The JBoss Group has announced that it will be offering indemnification against patent and copyright suits (relating to the JBoss Application Server) to its customers. "Among the challenges for companies moving to open source technologies, such as the JBoss application server, are concerns regarding intellectual property rights. By offering industry standard indemnification for the JBoss application server, JBoss Group is taking another vital step in its efforts to promote Professional Open Source for the enterprise market. The company is committed to making it easier and safer than ever for customers to develop and deploy open source technologies." There is no mention of what sort of insurance coverage the JBoss Group may have put into place to enable it to back up its promise if need be.
J2EE 1.4 Specification Wins Unanimous Vote of Approval From the Java Community Process
The Java Community Process has approved the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition [J2EE(TM)] version 1.4 specification in a unanimous vote. Sun Microsystems has offered the new specification and its Compatibility Test Suite (CTS) under new license terms friendly to non-profit and open source projects. Apache Software Foundation and JBoss Group are among the first open source organizations to license J2EE 1.4 specification and CTS. JBoss has issued its own press release.
MaxDB by MySQL Now Available
MySQL AB has announced that MaxDB by MySQL has been released. MaxDB is a heavy-duty, SAP-certified open source database that claims to offer high availability, scalability and a comprehensive feature set.
Enrico Pesatori To Take The Helm of Linux Leader Penguin Computing
Penguin Computing has named Enrico Pesatori as its president and chief executive officer. ""Enrico has a tremendous track record building and managing successful enterprise organizations and we are confident he will take Penguin Computing into its next phase of growth," said Sam Ockman, founder and chairman of the board of Penguin Computing."
Federal judiciary to move to Linux
While federal judges are considering the future of Linux in Delaware and Utah courts, the judiciary's administrative offices are switching to Linux. A company called PEC Solutions has sent out a press release stating that it has won the contract to do the conversion. "PEC will support the transition of the Judiciary's mission-sensitive applications, including case management, finance and accounting, probation and pretrial services, and case-tracking management systems to the Linux standard."
Resources
Tutorial: Potential of FOSS in Medicine (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews mentions the availability of a tutorial on the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine.
First release of Sodipodi flag collection (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for the first release of the Sodipodi SVG flag collection. "After our very successful call for contributions to our collection of flags we are now proud to announce the first release of the Sodipodi SVG flag collection. Currently the collection contains 215 different flags and we are just around 30 flags away from having all UN recognized international flags in our collection."
Linux Soundapps Site Updated
Dave Phillips has updated his list of Linux sound applications on his Sound & MIDI Software For Linux page.
LDP Weekly News
The Linux Documentation Project Weekly News for November 18, 2003 is out. Click below to see what's new at LDP.
Availability of COE Linux Platform review materials
The Open Group has announced the addition of a new certification program: "The Open Group is adding the Linux Platform to its COE Platform Certification program for DISA's Common Operating Environment and announces a formal review of the draft materials."
OpenI18N 1.3 added to LSB Certification program
The OpenI18N Globalization Specification 1.3 has been added to the LSB Certification program. "The new certification product standard is called the LSB Internationalized Runtime Environment 1.3 and is for platforms providing a common internationalized environment that conform to both the Free Standards Group LSB and OpenI18N specifications."
Windows-to-Linux roadmap: Part 1. Thinking in Linux (IBM developerWorks)
IBM has published a guide to help transition users from Windows to Linux. "If you have been using Windows for a long time, you are accustomed to rebooting the system for many reasons, from software installation to correcting problems with a service. This is a habit you will need to change to start thinking in Linux. Linux tends to be rather Newtonian in nature. Once set in motion, it will tend to stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force, such as a hardware failure."
Contests and Awards
2003 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards
LinuxQuestions.org has announced that voting is open in the 2003 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. There are lots of categories, including favorite Distribution, Browser, Multimedia application, Desktop and more.
Event Reports
Supercomputing announcements from SC2003
The Supercomputing Conference 2003 is in full swing in Phoenix, Arizona. Here are some of the Linux related press releases:- SGI displays a Linux powered
Altix 3000 supercomputer with 128 Intel Itanium 2 processors.
- Intel, California Digital and the University of California at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are
building a nearly 4,000 processor Linux supercomputer, codenamed
"Thunder".
- IBM claims 55% of the top 100 and
introduces Blue Gene/L.
- Linux Networx clusters
account for two of the top 10 fastest supercomputers.
- Dell claims 18 Linux clusters on the Top 500 list, including the #4 entry - a cluster at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Announcements from SC2003
Announcements from the second day of SC2003:- SGI announced they are building a 512
processor system for NASA Ames Research Center.
- Paracel announced
the Paracel Cyclone, a turnkey Linux cluster system.
- PathScale announced
a suite of compilers for the AMD Opteron processor. They claim the
PathScale Compiler Suite is the highest performance 64-bit compiler for
AMD Opteron-based Linux servers.
- Mountain View Data announced that its PowerCockpit Linux Management Framework now supports 64-bit AMD Opteron Processor-based Linux clusters.
Upcoming Events
YAPC::Israel::2004 - Call for Proposals (use Perl)
A Call for Proposals has gone out for the YAPC::Israel::2004 Perl conference, which will be held on February 26, 2004.
EuroPython, June 2004
The third Europython Conference will be held in Göteborg, Sweden on June 7-9, 2004.
First Linux Bangalore/2003 shortlist
The initial list of talks for the Linux Bangalore 2003 conference, which will be held in Bangalore, India on December 2-4, is available.
Cluster2003, Hong Kong
The 2003 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing will be held on December 1-4, 2003 in Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Eclipse Expands Conference Program for EclipseCon 2004
The EclipseCon 2004 will be held on February 2-5, 2004 in Anaheim, CA. "Eclipse announces the expansion of the conference program for EclipseCon 2004, which will feature the latest integrated software development technology for the Eclipse universal tools platform."
Events: November 20, 2003 - January 15, 2004
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| November 20 - 21, 2003 | Supercomputing Conference(SC2003) | (Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center)Phoenix, AZ |
| November 20 - 21, 2003 | ObjectWeb Conferenc3 | (INRIA Rocquencourt)Rocquencourt, France |
| November 20, 2003 | COMDEX 2003 | (Las Vegas Convention Center)Las Vegas, Nevada |
| November 22, 2003 | Southern California Linux Expo(SCALE) | (Los Angeles Convention Center)Los Angeles, CA |
| November 22 - 24, 2003 | New York GNOME Summit | (Brooklyn College)New York, NY |
| November 24 - 26, 2003 | Open Standards and Libre Software in Government Conference (CANCELLED)(EGOVOS 3) | Paris, France |
| November 26 - 27, 2003 | Forum PHP Paris 2003 | (Club Confair)Paris, France |
| December 1 - 4, 2003 | IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing(Cluster2003) | (Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel & Towers)Kowloon, Hong Kong |
| December 2 - 4, 2003 | Linux Bangalore/2003 | Bangalore, India |
| December 9 - 13, 2003 | International Conference on Logic Programming(ICLP'03) | Mumbai (Bombay), India |
| January 12 - 13, 2004 | Linux.Conf.au Miniconfs | Adelaide, Australia |
| January 12 - 13, 2004 | EducationaLinux 2004 | Adelaide, Australia |
| January 14 - 17, 2004 | Linux.conf.au | Adelaide, Australia |
Web sites
New mozilla.org Site Launches (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine has an announcement for the new Mozilla web site. "This new site caters more to the end user, with better product information, clearer download links and more details about help resources. New Mozilla initiatives, such as telephone support, CD sales and donations are now promoted throughout the site. Navigation has also been improved and a friendlier layout and colour scheme have been created. This is the first significant redesign of mozilla.org since its launch in 1998."
Software announcements
This week's software announcements
Here are the software announcements, courtesy of Freshmeat.net. They are available in two formats:
- Sorted alphabetically,
- Sorted by license.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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