Non-Commercial announcements
Version 2.0 of the Apache License has been approved.
"
The goals of this license revision have been to reduce the number
of frequently asked questions, to allow the license to be reusable
without modification by any project (including non-ASF projects),
to allow the license to be included by reference instead of listed
in every file, to clarify the license on submission of contributions,
to require a patent license on contributions that necessarily
infringe the contributor's own patents, and to move comments
regarding Apache and other inherited attribution notices to a
location outside the license terms."
Full Story (comments: none)
According to
this EFF
advisory, the DVD Copy Control Association has decided to push for the
dismissal of the DeCSS suit against Andrew Bunner. By doing so, the DVDCCA
has given up its attempt to claim that DeCSS violates trade secrets. The
battle to win the right to view DVDs on Linux systems is not yet won, since
DeCSS remains vulnerable to DMCA charges. But the elimination of the trade
secret attack is an important step in the right direction.
Comments (5 posted)
At 1:49 UTC on January 29, Freenode (once #linuxneo, once
irc.linpeople.org) will celebrate its 10th birthday. It started small in
1994, but has grown since then: "
Today, Freenode peaks at over 15,000 users, and we're home to coordination
channels for such projects as Debian GNU/Linux, fedora, Gentoo, KDE and
subversion. We're the official IRC network of the Free Software
Foundation's GNU project; we provide support channels for FreeBSD, GNU/Linux
and a variety of free software applications." The party will be
happening over IRC, of course, and will last all day; click below for the
details.
Full Story (comments: 1)
The Free Standards Group has
announced that it has been recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a "submitter of publicly available specifications" for Linux. This is the first step toward the FSG's goal of getting ISO certification for the Linux standards.
Comments (4 posted)
The IEEE and The Open Group have given the Linux Man Pages
project permission to incorporate materials from the
POSIX Standard and the Open Group Base Specifications.
Full Story (comments: none)
NEC Soft, a Japanese software and systems integration firm,
has joined the OSDL.
Full Story (comments: none)
The
Ogg Vorbis site
mentions several moves by RealNetworks to support Ogg Vorbis,
an open-source audio compression system that is similar to mp3.
"
A triple treat! First, RealNetworks has awarded the Xiph.Org foundation one of its Helix Grants to support continued development of Ogg, second, the Real Helix player now supports Vorbis and [alpha-release] Theora, and third, Real has announced its intention to support Ogg across client, server and native production tools."
Comments (49 posted)
The wxWindows cross-platform GUI project
has cancelled its new copyright assignment process.
"
The wxWindows Software Foundation regrets that it is cancelling the copyright assignment process due to support for assignment within the wxWindows community failing to reach a critical mass."
Comments (none posted)
Commercial announcements
Intel Corp.
has announced a new version of its commercial
performance analysis tool for the Itanium processor.
Comments (1 posted)
The
MandrakeSoft
shareholder newsletter for the company's first quarter is out. The
bottom line: a €270,000 profit, the company's first in years.
MandrakeSoft predicts a break-even result for the rest of the coming year.
Comments (3 posted)
MySQL AB has announced the availability of the commercial
MySQL Administrator.
"
MySQL Administrator is a powerful visual administration console so you can now easily administer your MySQL environment and gain significantly better visibility into the how your databases are operating. MySQL Administrator now integrates database management and maintenance into a single, seamless environment, with a clear and intuitive graphical user interface."
Comments (none posted)
Those of us who have been watching Red Hat for a while will remember "Wide Open Source," an online news site that the company launched back when it was planning to be in the web portal business. Wide Open didn't last for very long, but, at LinuxWorld, Red Hat has
announced its return - this time as a subscription-based, bi-monthly print magazine.
Comments (none posted)
Red Hat
has announced that it will be releasing a Hindi version of
Linux in India.
"
Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chief executive officer and president who is
visiting India, said Thursday that the Hindi version would hit Indian markets
in two months."
Comments (none posted)
Sleepycat Software, the company behind the Berkeley DB, has
announced that sales grew 60% in 2003 and the company achieved "record levels of profitability." It
is possible to make money in the free software business, it seems.
Comments (9 posted)
Sun's Jonathan Schwartz has
posted an
open letter to IBM on how IBM could move over to Linux desktops.
"
You're probably familiar with Sun's Java Desktop System - it's the
most popular Linux desktop on the market today, featuring Sun's Java
Virtual Machine, the award winning StarOffice productivity suite, Mozilla
browser, Gnome windowing environment, and support from Real Networks,
Macromedia and Adobe.... To help IBM with your transition, we can
offer a desktop for every one of your employees - with a free right to use
the desktop at home - for $50/employee. Consider this a formal quote from
Sun. But only if you're willing to buy in volume."
Comments (30 posted)
Here's a
press
release from weather.com expressing their satisfaction with their new
Dell systems powered by SUSE Linux.
Comments (5 posted)
Xandros has sent out a couple of announcements this morning. The first is
for its new "Business Desktop," which is optimized to work within
Windows-dominated environments. Xandros "xDMS" is a management system
intended to help with the administration of thousands of desktops.
Full Story (comments: none)
New Books
Prentice Hall has published the book
C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3
by Blanchette and Summerfield.
Full Story (comments: none)
Resources
The Linux Documentation Project Weekly News is out for January 21,
2004. Take a look for the latest documentation changes.
Full Story (comments: none)
The January 28, 2004 edition of the Linux Documentation Project Weekly News
has been published. Take a look for the latest new documentation
releases.
Full Story (comments: none)
Contests and Awards
The winners of the LinuxWorld Magazine Readers' Choice Awards
have been announced.
"
LinuxWorld Magazine Readers' Choice Awards Recognize 56 Winners and Finalists for Excellence in Every Aspect of Linux in 14 Separate Categories, From Best Linux Distro to Best Linux Programming Environment".
Comments (none posted)
IDG World Expo has
announced the winners of the Product Excellence Awards at LinuxWorld
Conference & Expo. Some of the award winners include Novell, IBM
Tivoli, Xandros and KDE.
Comments (4 posted)
A new
Perl Haiku Contest
is being held by ActiveState. Prizes are available, Perl Poetry should
be submitted by February 8, 2004.
Comments (none posted)
Event Reports
LinuxWorld is, as always, an effective generator of press releases. Here's
a sampling:
- Arkeia has a
new backup offering which includes hot backup for MySQL
databases.
- Black Duck Software has announced
its existence as a company providing software for automated
"software intellectual property risk management."
- Concurrent has
announced the availability of RedHawk Linux 2.0, a real-time
distribution aimed at the AMD64 processor.
- IBM has announced
the "Carrier Grade Open Framework Reference Implementation," based on
Linux.
- Intel is shipping
the "VTune" performance analyzer tool (v2.0) for Linux.
- MySQL and Zend have announced
a partnership to improve the integration between MySQL and PHP.
MySQL has also released
a new administration tool.
- MySQL and JBoss have also announced
a partnership to integrate their respective offerings.
- Pathscale has
a set of high-performance Linux compilers for C, C++, and Fortran
on the AMD64 architecture.
- Progeny has announced
that its Red Hat Linux Transition Service is getting a "tremendous"
response.
- Red Hat has announced
a new provisioning module for the Red Hat Network.
- Scalix has released
a new version of its calendaring and messaging system for Linux.
- Scyld has announced
the "29-series" release of Scyld Beowulf, featuring Itanium and AMD64
support along with numerous new features.
Comments (none posted)
The World Social Forum in Mumbai, India made use of Linux and open-source
software.
"
Free Software keeps communications alive at the WSF The Media Center at
WSF 2004, equipped with a complete network lab of 120 computers and 40
lap-top connections was maintained open and functional 24 hrs for the
entire forum with FREE SOFTWARE!!!"
Full Story (comments: none)
Upcoming Events
The second Linux Audio Developers (LAD) conference has been announced.
The event will take place from April 29 - May 2, 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany.
A call for music (CFM) is included in the announcement.
Full Story (comments: none)
Members of the AGNULA project (A GNU Linux Audio distribution)
will be at the GNU/Linux Audio Centre booth during the
Sounds Expo 2004 conference in London on February 10-12, 2004.
Full Story (comments: none)
The Open Group will be holding their Boundaryless Information Flow: Open Standards & Certification conference on February 2-6, 2004 in
San Diego, CA.
Full Story (comments: none)
The Third Annual CodeCon conference will be held in San Francisco, CA
on February 20-22, 2004.
Full Story (comments: none)
A free workshop entitled "Copyright in the Digital Age" will be
held in Brussels on February 4, 2004.
"
This is a one day workshop hosted by the The Trans Atlantic Consumer
Dialogue (TACD) Committee on Intellectual Property, with support from the
Rockefeller Foundation."
Full Story (comments: none)
LogOn Technology Transfer has announced its upcoming technical briefings
program.
"
As part of the enhanced educational program of this year's CeBIT show in
Hannover (March 18-24, 2004), LogOn Technology Transfer is organizing a
program of technical briefings."
Full Story (comments: none)
The next
Mozilla Developer Day will be held on February 27, 2004 in
(or near) Mountain View, CA.
Comments (none posted)
The first Enterprise Software Summit
has been announced. The event will take place on May 17-19, 2004
in San Francisco, CA.
"
The list of topics to be addressed include: offshore
outsourcing, utility computing, licensing models, open source issues,
consolidation, revenue recognition issues and many more of the challenges
facing the new software industry."
Comments (none posted)
The sixth
German Perl Workshop
will be held near Stuttgart, Germany on June 29 - July 1, 2004.
A
call for papers has been posted.
Comments (none posted)
The early bird registration deadline for PyCon DC 2004 is February 1, 2004.
Full Story (comments: none)
| Date | Event | Location |
| January 29 - February 1, 2004 | NordU/USENIX 2004 | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| January 29, 2004 | Linux for business 2004 | Hotel De Biltsche Hoek, de Bilt |
| 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 |
| February 20 - 22, 2004 | CodeCon 2004 | (Club NV)San Francisco, CA |
| February 20 - 24, 2004 | PaWS PHP and Web Standards UK 2004 | Manchester, UK |
| February 21 - 22, 2004 | Mozilla Developers Meeting in Europe 4.0 | Brussels, Belgium |
| February 21 - 22, 2004 | FOSDEM 2004 | (SOLBOSCH)Brussels, Belgium |
| February 23 - 27, 2004 | PostgreSQL Bootcamp | (Big Nerd Ranch, Inc.)Atlanta, GA |
| February 25 - 26, 2004 | UKUUG LISA/Winter Conference and Tutorial | (Lansdowne Campus, Bournemouth Univ.)Bournemouth, UK |
| February 27, 2004 | Mozilla Developer Day | Mountain View, CA |
| March 1 - 5, 2004 | PHP|Cruise | The Caribbean |
| March 5, 2004 | Perl Workshop 2004 | Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
| March 15 - 17, 2004 | Open Source in Government Conference | (George Washington University)Washington, DC |
| March 16 - 17, 2004 | Open Source Business Conference 2004 | (The Westin St. Francis)San Francisco, CA |
| March 18 - 24, 2004 | CeBIT | (Hannover Exhibition Center)Hannover, Germany |
| March 24 - 26, 2004 | PyCon DC 2004 | Washington, D.C. |
| March 27 - 28, 2004 | Nordic Perl Workshop 2004 | (Symbion Science Park)Copenhagen, Denmark |
| March 27 - 28, 2004 | YAPC::Taipei::2004 | Taipei, Taiwan |
Comments (none posted)
Web sites
Steve Mallett
has announced
his OSDir open source applications forum in an O'Reilly article.
The forum aims to help Windows users transition to the world of
Open Source software.
Comments (none posted)
Software announcements
Here are the software announcements, courtesy of
Freshmeat.net. They are available in
two formats:
Comments (none posted)
Page editor: Forrest Cook