Announcements

Non-Commercial announcements

Linux Group Aims for Enterprise Desktop

Developers from both the Debian and KDE projects have announced an initiative to provide a Linux desktop operating system aimed at the needs of large organizations. By working together the group intends to deliver an integrated solution for the desktop needs of government agencies, educational institutions and enterprises.

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Preliminary results for the GNOME Foundation elections (Footnotes)

Footnotes reports on the preliminary results of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors. "The next board of directors will consist of:
Owen Taylor - Glynn Foster - Jody Goldberg - Jeff Waugh - Luis Villa - Jonathan Blandford - Nat Friedman - Leslie Proctor - Bill Haneman - Dave Camp - Malcolm Tredinnick"

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Healthcare Desktop Project Announced (LinuxMedNews)

A new open-source health care project has been announced. "I would like to notify everyone interested in Open Source healthcare software about a new Open Source project - Healthcare Desktop. In short our project goal is to create an open source (snip.) software package that covers all aspects of work in modern hospital."

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Commercial announcements

MandrakeSoft shareholder newsletter

MandrakeSoft has posted its shareholder newsletter for the 2002/2003 fiscal year. Revenue for the year was €3.9 million, down from €4.7 million the year before; the company attributes the decline to its bankruptcy proceedings, the weak economy, and the decline of the dollar. The company's losses also fell, however, to €2.2 million, less than half of what it lost the year before, and gross margins have increased considerably. MandrakeSoft claims to cash-flow positive since January, and to be heading toward a positive operating result in the current quarter. It looks like an exit from the bankruptcy process will be happening before too long.

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Reasoning Study Reveals Code Quality of MySQL

Reasoning Inc. has released the results of a study of MySQL. "Reasoning's inspection study shows that the code quality of MySQL was six times better than that of comparable proprietary code. A key quality indicator is defect density, which is defined as the number of defects found per thousand lines of source code. In its latest study, Reasoning found 21 software defects in 236,000 lines of MySQL source code. The defect density of the MySQL code was 0.09 defects per thousand lines of source code. Using a benchmark that covered over 200 recent projects totaling 35 million lines of commercial code, Reasoning found that the commercial average defect density of these projects came to 0.57 defects per thousand lines of source code."

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Fujitsu Promoting PostgreSQL

Fujitsu is promoting PostgreSQL. "In cooperation with SRA/Japan, Fujitsu has developed a custom version of PostgreSQL which is a merger of the community PostgreSQL release and its powerful, proprietary storage engine called Symfoware. The resulting product, called Powergres Plus, is now being marketed by Fujitsu".

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Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat, has posted an open letter to Darl McBride, CEO of SCO. "Darl, for the sake of your case in front of the courts, for the sake of your company's ability to win customers, for the sake of everyone's blood pressure, and to save yourself further personal embarrassment, you might want to be less vocal. All you are doing is causing your audience to educate themselves. Once everyone understands how wrong you are your stock price will suffer."

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3rd Millennium releases code as open source

3rd Millennium has announced the release of its knowledge management system to the open source community. The software is a foundation technology for knowledge management solutions in biopharmaceutical research and development.

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Use of "Lindows" name blocked in Sweden

Lindows.com has sent out a press release entitled "Microsoft blocks distribution of desktop Linux in Sweden." What has really happened, of course, is that Microsoft has succeeded in a trademark challenge against the "Lindows" name in that country. Lindows is portraying Microsoft's actions as directed against Linux in general ("Microsoft is using lawsuits as a battering ram to smash Linux, to prevent it from reaching retail stores"), but the real scope of the case is a bit narrower than that.

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RWE Innogy Selects Verano's Linux-based Performux

Verano has announced that RWE Innogy, a UK energy company, has installed Verano's Performux, a real-time plant intelligence software platform. According to Verano, Performux is the first Linux-based, plant operations software platform to offer secure, Internet-enabled management of critical industrial operations.

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Red Hat Application Server *Beta 1* Availability

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Application Server v1.0 Beta 1. The package includes Tomcat 4.1.27, Struts 1.0.2, JOnAS 3.3, sample JOnAS and Struts web applications, supporting modules for file uploads, AJP and WARP protocols, and JDBC drivers for MySQL.

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Novell Nterprise Linux Services released

Novell has sent out a press release proclaiming the availability of its "Novell Nterprise Linux Services 1.0" offering. This product brings Novell's variety of integrated printing, file management, directory management, and messaging services to the Red Hat and SUSE enterprise distributions.

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Resources

Report: Open Source Software: Perspectives for Development

The Dravis Group has published a report called "Open Source Software: Perspectives for Development," it is available as a 44-page PDF file. The report looks at the use of free software in the developing world, with case studies and "lessons learned" from several countries. (Seen on OpenSector).

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December Troubleshooters Magazine

The December issue of Troubleshooters is out, with a comprehensive GIMP tutorial and lots of other stuff. "If I were stranded on a desert island with only one graphical tool, I pray it would be Gimp. Gimp might not be easiest for specific applications, but it can do just about anything. This article gives an overview of a select few of Gimp's abilities. Gimp has MANY more abilities than discussed in this article."

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PHP Magazine

The first issue of the new PHP Magazine is available online for free. "The PHP Magazine is your monthly dose of PHP, containing an assortment of carefully handpicked articles from the vast resource pool of the international PHP Magazine editorial."

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Introduction to Mozilla Manual Available (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine has an announcement for a new Mozilla introductory manual. "Kevin Quiggle writes: "A guide to Mozilla 1.5 — Introduction to Mozilla — A Manual for First Time Users — is now complete and is available for download as an illustrated PDF file (source documents used to create the manual are also available). This publication is intended to introduce new users of Mozilla to key features and functions."

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The Independent Qt Tutorial (KDE.News)

Johan Thelin has announced the availability of a new Qt tutorial. "I have started writing a gentle introduction to Qt called The Independent Qt Tutorial. It currently consists of nine chapters and deals with how to setup Qt, how to use QtDesigner, how to write an application by hand, etc. The purpose of the tutorial is to cover all areas of Qt needed to write top quality applications."

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Event Reports

Report: KDE at Linux Bangalore 2003

KDE.News has a report on Linux Bangalore, as viewed from the KDE booth. "One thing I've noticed is that in India, Linux is synonymous with Red Hat simply because they seem to be the only distribution to have put serious effort into this market so far. Almost all the demo machines at the conf were running it, and most people's KDE experiences seem to be from Red Hat too. Not such a great thing, especially as downloading software off the net is hard due to the low availability of broadband. I hadn't really anticipated this, so at the conf itself I spent quite a bit of time burning and giving away CDs with whatever KDE sources happened to be on my laptop at the time. It's going to be very important to get good KDE packages onto the next few Fedora releases, as its quite hard to even find other distributions for sale."

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UMEET 2003 conference

The fourth edition of the UMEET Conference is underway. UMEET 2003 is a virtual conference (taking place via the web and IRC) and it includes topics like software patents, free software, security and recent Linux developments. You can look at the program and register to receive updates about the conference. The conference began on December 15, and will finish December 23, with a talk by Rik van Riel.

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Upcoming Events

CodeCon 3.0 Call for Papers (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal covers a call for papers for CodeCon. The deadline for proposals is December 15, 2003. CodeCon 3.0 will be held February 20-22, 2004, in San Francisco, California.

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Linux Audio Conference #2 CFM

A Call For Music has gone out for the 2nd conference of the Linux Audio Developers, to be held in Karlsruhe, Germany on April 29 - May 2, 2004. "As a new feature there will be presentations of music in addition to technical talks. For this, we are looking for music that has been produced completely or mostly under Linux."

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PostgreSQL Bootcamp

Bruce Momjian will be leading a PostgreSQL Bootcamp on February 23-27, 2004 near Atlanta, GA.

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Nordic Perl Workshop in Copenhagen (use Perl)

The Nordic Perl Workshop for 2004 has been announced. The event will take place in Copenhagen from March 27-28, 2004. Also, see the event's Call for Papers.

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YAPC::Taipei::2004 - Call For Participation (use Perl)

A Call For Participation for the YAPC::Taipei::2004 conference is online. "YAPC::Taipei::2004 will take place on 27th-28th, March 2004; the topic of this conference is "Projects for Developers", where we will unveil "OpenFoundry", a collaboration environment based on widely-used Perl projects such as Mason, RT, Sympa and Kwiki."

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PyCon DC 2004 Submissions Open

Submissions are being accepted for the PyCon DC 2004 Python conference. The event will take place in Washington, DC in March, 2004.

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MySQL Users Conference 2004 Call for Papers

A Call for Papers has gone out for the MySQL Users Conference & Expo 2004. The event will be held in Orlando, Florida on April 14-16, 2004.

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Linux Installfest in Davis

The Linux Users' Group of Davis will be holding another Linux Installfest on December 21, 2003 at UC Davis.

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Linux.Conf.Au 2004 update

An update notice has gone out for the Linux.Conf.Au 2004 event. "Just over 4 weeks to go - and it's all getting a little bit exciting!"

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OSCon 2004 Call for Participation (use Perl)

Use Perl has a Call for Participation for the OSCon 2004 conference, the event will take place in Portland, OR on July 26-30, 2004.

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Mozilla Developers Meeting in Europe 4.0 Announced (MozillaZine)

The Mozilla Developers Meeting in Europe 4.0 has been announced. The event will take place in Brussels on February 21-22, 2004.

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Events: December 18, 2003 - February 12, 2004

Date	Event	Location
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
January 20 - 23, 2004	LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2004	(Jacob K. Javits Convention Center)New York, New York
January 31 - February 1, 2004	WineConf 2004	(Court International Building)St. Paul, Minnesota
February 2 - 6, 2004	EclipseCon 2004	(Disneyland Hotel)Anaheim, CA
February 2 - 4, 2004	Open Standards and Certification Conference	(San Diego Marriott Mission Valley)San Diego, CA
February 3 - 5, 2004	Linux Solutions 2004	Paris, France
February 9 - 12, 2004	O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference(ETech)	(The Westin Horton Plaza)San Diego, CA

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Mailing Lists

New Mailing List 'kdepim-users'

A new kdepim-users mailing list has been announced. "pim.kde.org reports that a new mailing list kdepim-users for discussion about the usage of the KDE PIM applications (Kontact, KAddressBook, KMail, KOrganizer and everything else in the kdepim CVS module) has been created. Users who want to help with user support for the KDE PIM applications are very welcome to the new mailinglist."

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Web sites

The Abusable Technologies Awareness Center

The Abusable Technologies Awareness Center site has been set up "to provide current and accurate information about technology that oversteps its bounds." The site is run by an extensive set of panelists which includes Steve Bellovin, Matt Bishop, Matt Blaze, Bill Cheswick, Ed Felten, Dan Geer, Avi Rubin, Bruce Schneier, and several others.

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EC Open Source Observatory launches

The Open Source Observatory, operated by the European Commission's "Interchange of Data Between Administrations" agency, is now online. It includes a news section, an events calender (incomplete - it's missing FOSDEM,for example), case studies, etc.

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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.

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Page editor: Forrest Cook