Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
LPI-US Launches National Training Partner Program
The Linux Professional Institute's United States Affiliate (LPI-US) has announced that The Training Camp has been approved to receive designation as a LPI-US Approved Training Partner (LATP).Legislative fun: the "PIRATE" act
Here is a press release from Senator Patrick Leahy on his sponsorship of the "protecting intellectual property rights against theft and expropriation" act in the Senate. This law would allow the federal government to get into the business of filing copyright infringement suits and set up a fund to pay for them. "Under current law, the Attorney General can only bring criminal copyright cases, which can be difficult to prosecute because, among other factors, they require a high standard of proof. The Leahy-Hatch bill would allow the Attorney General to file civil claims that could include damages and restitution without criminal penalties." Once upon a time, requiring a high standard of proof was considered to be a good thing.
Commercial announcements
Mandrakesoft Exits Bankruptcy
The Commerce Court has accepted Mandrakesoft's exit plan from 'redressement judiciaire' (Chapter 11 like protection). The plan was approved as proposed by the company and its court appointed administrator.DRLX 1.0 Ships; Simplifies Deployment of Linux-Based Embedded System Applications
Devicelogics has announced DRLX 1.0, a DR-DOS-based Linux loader that loads a complete Linux kernel while preserving DR-DOS in memory so that, upon Linux session completion, the system returns to DR-DOS.Linux Thin Clients To Replace Sun In School Board
Systems Aligned Inc. has announced a project where Sun computers will be replaced by Linux boxes. "Selected for a pilot project to replace Sun Microsystems software and hardware, the Linux thin clients and servers will be used to lower hardware maintainence costs, take advantage of the thousands of open source applications available for Linux, and to ensure the student to computer ratio remains at near two to one."
Mozilla Foundation Soliciting Proposals for Support Services (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine has posted this request for help with end user support. "The Mozilla Foundation is exploring offering additional end user support options, in addition or instead of the existing telephone support provided by DecisionOne. To this end, the Foundation is soliciting proposals from companies or community members who wish to be awarded contracts to provide these services. Submissions must be well thought out and shown to be viable."
SOT donates source code worth over 1M Euro
Finland's SOT has converted a large project, the Pupesoft.com financial software, to open-source. "SOT has donated over 50,000 lines of source code to a financial software project. The code has taken over 10 work years to create, and represents more than a million euros worth of effort. The code will be freely available as a part of the pupesoft.com project and will be released under the GPL license."
OSRM's open source risk management seminars
Open Source Risk Management, the company offering insurance against open source intellectual property risks, has announced a series of seminars across the U.S. on, presumably, why you need to buy their offerings. "Each one-day seminar will give attendees an introduction to Free and Open Source Software, the top five most important potential IP risks, Open Source- specific risks, and best practice protocols for mitigating those risks. Seminar directors will also provide an analysis of current litigation around Open Source software."
The MPEG "Rights Expression Language"
A whole pile of companies has sent out a press release proclaiming the approval by the International Organization for Standardization of its first digital rights management standard. The "Rights Expression Language" (REL) is a mechanism which allows content providers to have (or at least specify) fine-grained control over what can be done with digital information. "This rich language will be used not only in the entertainment industry, but also by enterprises and individuals to enable the authorized distribution and persistent protection of valuable data and content in accordance with privacy and confidentiality requirements."
New Books
Larry Lessig's New Book - Free Online Version of "Free Culture" (Groklaw)
Groklaw has an announcement for the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. The book is available for download in pdf format."Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition" Released by O'Reilly
O'Reilly has published the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer.
Resources
Mozilla Developer Day Slides for Firefox, Thunderbird and Advanced RDF Talks (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine reports on the availability of slides from the Mozilla Developer Day. "The Mozilla Firefox slides discuss the future of the standalone browser, while the Mozilla Thunderbird slides do much the same for the standalone email and newsgroups client. A set of slides on advanced RDF completes the trio."
The LDP Weekly News
The March 31, 2004 edition of the Linux Documentation Project Weekly News is out with the latest new documentation releases.
Contests and Awards
TPF Grant for 1st Quarter 2004 (use Perl)
The Perl Foundation has awarded $1000 to Simon Cozens. "The Perl Foundation is proud to announce the latest grant aimed at furthering development in Perl, Simon Cozens will receive $1000 to enhance Maypole. Maypole is a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for web applications, similar to Java's Struts, but designed for minimal coding and maximal flexibility."
Upcoming Events
A Linux-based "flash mob" supercomputer
On April 3, the University of San Francisco will be hosting "FlashMob 1," an attempt to bring together a large number of people with laptops and link them together into a supercomputer powerful enough to get onto the "top 500" list. To this end, each participant will be given a CD with a special-purpose, CD-based Linux distribution on it. Click below for the press release, or see the FlashMob Computing web site for more information.LinuxWorld Malaysia and Singapore
Two new LinuxWorld Conference & Expo events have been announced. One will be held on May 11 and 12 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the other will take place in Singapore on May 25 and 26.COMDEX Las Vegas 2004
MediaLive has announced the dates for COMDEX Las Vegas 2004 (November 14 - November 18). The call for papers is open.Python UK Conference
The Python UK Conference will be held on April 16 and 17, 2004 in Oxford, England.Events: April 1 - May 27, 2004
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| April 1, 2004 | Embedded Systems Conference | (Moscone Center)San Francisco, CA |
| April 1 - 2, 2004 | USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies(FAST '04) | (Grand Hyatt Hotel)San Francisco, CA |
| April 5 - 7, 2004 | Samba eXPerience 2004 | (Hotel Freizeit In)Göttingen, Germany |
| April 5 - 8, 2004 | ClusterWorld Conference & Expo | (San Jose Convention Center)San Jose, California |
| April 13 - 15, 2004 | Real World Linux 2004 Conference & Expo | (Metro Toronto Convention Centre)Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| April 14 - 16, 2004 | MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2004 | (Peabody Hotel Orlando)Orlando, FL |
| April 14 - 17, 2004 | ACCU Spring Conference 2004 | (Randolph Hotel)Oxford, England |
| April 16 - 18, 2004 | Penguicon 2.0 | (Detroit Sheraton Novi Hotel)Novi, MI |
| April 16 - 17, 2004 | Python UK Conference | (Randolph Hotel)Oxford, England |
| April 20 - 21, 2004 | LinuxUser & Developer Expo | (Olympia)London, England |
| April 22 - 23, 2004 | 2004 Desktop Linux Summit | (Del Mar Fairgrounds)San Diego, California |
| April 26 - 27, 2004 | Digital Media Project Traditional Rights and Usages Workshop | Los Angeles, CA |
| April 29 - May 2, 2004 | 2nd Linux Audio Developers Conference | (Institute for Music and Acoustics)Karlsruhe, Germany |
| May 3 - 5, 2004 | International PHP Conference 2004 Spring Edition | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| May 6 - 8, 2004 | TheServerSide Java Symposium | (The Venetian)Las Vegas, NV |
| May 11 - 12, 2004 | LinuxWorld Conference & Expo | (Hotel Istana)Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia |
| May 16 - 18, 2004 | European Firebird Conference 2004 | Fulda, Germany |
| May 17 - 20, 2004 | Fifth LCI International Conference on Linux Clusters | (University of Texas)Austin, TX |
| May 17 - 19, 2004 | Enterprise Software Summit | (The Palace Hotel)San Francisco, CA |
| May 17 - 20, 2004 | Black Hat Briefings Europe 2004 | (Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky)Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
| May 17 - 21, 2004 | Apache Boot Camp | Atlanta, GA |
| May 20 - 22, 2004 | Austrian Perl Workshop | Vienna, Austria |
| May 25 - 26, 2004 | LinuxWorld Conference & Expo | (Suntec)Singapore |
| May 26 - June 6, 2004 | DebConf4 | Porto Alegre, Brazil |
| May 26 - 29, 2004 | 2nd International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval | Esbjerg, Denmark |
Event Reports
The ongoing Novell PR flood
Novell continues to crank out the press releases from its "BrainShare" party:
- The company has announced
a deal with HP whereby SUSE Linux will become HP's standard
distribution for its desktop and laptop systems.
- The $50 million investment from IBM (announced at the same time as
the SUSE purchase) has now been
finalized.
- IBM and Novell have also announced a deal that lets IBM preload SUSE Linux on its entire server line.
Some embedded Linux press releases
The Embedded Systems Conference is underway, resulting in the usual pile of press releases. Here's a few of the Linux-related ones:
- Axentra has announced a line of "server appliance systems," along the lines of the boxes Cobalt used to sell.
- Devicelogics has announced the availability of KDeBUG, a proprietary Linux kernel debugger.
- Kenati Technologies has announced the release of "NP Blox," an application development tool for embedded Linux systems.
- LynuxWorks announces a new embedded Java development environment and a real-time specification for Java.
- MontaVista has announced that its distribution is being used for parking lot fare collection systems made by the Thales Group; they have been deployed at the Paris Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports.
- MontaVista and DoubleWide Software have let it be known that DoubleWide's virtualization products work on MontaVista Linux.
- Openwave Systems and MontaVista have announced a partnership "to further develop the emerging ecosystem around advanced Linux- based phones."
- TimeSys has announced that its "TimeStorm" tool suite works with any embedded Linux distribution.
PyCon DC 2004 coverage
David Goodger has posted his coverage of the PyCon DC 2004 event.
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.
Miscellaneous
IPI: Has open source reached its limits?
The "Institute for Policy Innovation" has posted an "issue brief" trashing free software in just about every way it can. "For law firms and lawyers, open source represents a rich opportunity to benefit from the increased complexity of licensing and copyright agreements. Only lawyers benefit from this." One can only assume the author has not read many proprietary license agreements recently. (Thanks to Duncan Coutts).
Page editor: Forrest Cook