Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Linux Medical News Turns 5 (LinuxMedNews)
Linux Medical News has announced its fifth anniversary. "At the time Linux Medical News began, there were many FOSS medical projects underway, but none were ready for real world deployment and you could not easily get a service contract for one. That has all changed. There are now several thriving FOSS projects that are being used in the real world, supported by profitable companies which will sell you a service contract. In fact, competition among medical FOSS companies for service contracts is now occurring."
How to make Microsoft respect European Authorities (FSFE)
The Free Software Foundation Europe recommends that Microsoft be subject to permanent monitoring to insure compliance with the decisions of the European Court. "In order to write interoperable software, developers use so-called Interface Definition Language Files (IDL). These are currently held secret by Microsoft, so no one else can write interoperable software. In order to comply with its obligations, Microsoft should have to make these available, along with a description of the encryption methods they have employed, under a license enabling them to be implemented in Free Software."
Software patents putting International Financial Report Standards in danger (FSFE)
The Free Software Foundation Europe has sent an open letter to the president of the European Information & Communications Technology Industry Association (EICTA) concerning the dangers of software patents.
Commercial announcements
FreeMED 'Help Desk' Support Available Now (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews has an announcement for a help desk service for the FreeMED Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management system. "This service is intended to provide users with increased productivity by making support services more readily available for any problems, concerns and or operation questions about the systems."
New Study says Mid-Sized Companies Not Interested in Linux
Info-Tech Research Group has studied Linux adoption in mid-sized companies, finding that few will adopt Linux anytime soon. "The study highlighted the divide that is occurring between large companies who are increasingly embracing open source, and smaller companies who remain Microsoft-centric. Of the companies who did not already have Linux installed, 48 percent have no interest whatsoever and a further 15 percent are not sure."
LinuxGenius Launches LinuxCBT Mail Edition Training Software
LinuxGenius, LLC has announced a new CD-based Linux mail system training course. "LinuxCBT Mail Edition contains 40 hours of comprehensive, in depth training that focuses entirely on Linux Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) and associated mail components."
Mandrakesoft completes Conectiva Acquisition
Mandrakesoft has announced the completion of its acquisition of Conectiva. "Mandrakesoft shareholders, at the extraordinary shareholders' meeting on March 30th 2005, approved the acquisition of Conectiva, the Brazilian Linux company. The necessary resolutions have been adopted, and thus the acquisition is now effective."
Yet another Microsoft-funded anti-Linux study
Here's a press release from Microsoft touting another study it bought; this one claims that Windows is more reliable than Linux. "'Customers have told us that kernel uptime or availability of a single component is only one factor in how they view reliability; real customer pain is caused by the system itself failing to meet its reliability requirements over time,' said Martin Taylor, general manager of the Platform Strategy Group at Microsoft. 'This study shows that when compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, Windows Server 2003 is easier to maintain and predictable, and allows end users to access the resources they need in a timely manner.'"
OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board Formed
Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the names of the five individuals selected to participate in the OpenSolaris(TM) Community Advisory Board (CAB). "The five member board consists of two members who were nominated and elected by the OpenSolaris pilot community: Al Hopper, engineer consultant, Logical Approach; and Rich Teer, independent Solaris consultant and author of "Solaris Systems Programming." The three other members on the advisory board are Roy Fielding, chief scientist at Day Software and co-founder and member, the Apache Software Foundation; Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist, Sun; and Casper Dik, senior staff engineer, Sun."
2005 O'Reilly ETech Conference Explores "Remix" Culture
O'Reilly has sent out a press release describing the recent ETech Conference. "Hackers and other innovators have embraced the do-it-yourself renaissance, tweaking here and integrating there, creating new tools and inspiring a resurgence of hands-on experimentation. These new, unexpected combinations--and the opportunities they present--were the driving force behind the 2005 edition of ETech, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, held in San Diego, California, March 14-17."
Sensory Networks will provide hw acceleration for ClamAV (SourceForge)
SourceForge has announced a partnership with Sensory Networks. "Sensory Networks, the leading provider of hardware acceleration for network security applications, started a partnership with us to provide hardware acceleration support for the Clam AntiVirus suite."
SGI Altix Outperforms others in HPC Challenge
SGI has announced that its Altix 3000 system has outperformed machines from IBM, Cray and Sun. "Results submitted March 2 by SGI show that a 64-processor SGI Altix system bested similarly configured servers from IBM, Cray and Sun on five of the HPC Challenge (HPCC) Benchmark's list of eight tests. The HPCC benchmark extends the Linpack benchmark used to determine the well-known Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers."
SpikeSource Joins OSDL
SpikeSource has announced it is joining the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). "Participation in OSDL initiatives will allow SpikeSource to collaborate with other members by sharing information and expertise on the latest open source projects, stacks, applications, system management tools, patches and bugs."
The SpikeSource PR flood
SpikeSource has decided that the time has come to unleash a torrent of press releases describing the company's offerings. This release describes the "Core Stack" offering - a combined packaging of several free projects (MySQL, Python, Apache, JBoss, ...) said to be tested as a whole; there are associated subscription and support offerings. The company has released a couple of tools for the testing and management of "open source assets." There is a testing service which is being offered for free to some open source projects. Finally, SpikeSource has announced an "ecosystem" of companies with which it is working.VA Linux offers kernel debugging services
VA Linux Systems Japan K.K. has announced the availability of its "VA Quest" offering - essentially a service for tracking down and dealing with kernel bugs which might be getting in its customers' way. "VA Quest offers consultation services by VA Linux's accomplished Linux kernel experts. They can thoroughly analyze failure on customers' GNU/Linux systems by reading the source code of the Linux kernel and memory dump, and then track the reason down, offer the way to fix or avoid the problem, provide patches, etc."
New Books
A Perl of a Higher Order (use Perl)
use Perl has an announcement for a new Perl book. "Mark Jason Dominus' book Higher-Order Perl is finally available. The subtitle is "Transforming Programs with Programs". It's about using perl's functional programming capabilities to write more powerful programs."
Resources
Update of "Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!" paper
David A. Wheeler has announced a new version of his paper: "Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers!". "One of the biggest changes is the addition of a lot of market share data on Mozilla Firefox/Mozilla, compared to Internet Explorer."
Chap 5 of New CUPS Manual - Basic Printer Management
A new chapter from the CUPS printing system documentation has been announced. The topic covered is Basic Printer Management.Linux Gazette #113 is out
The April Linux Gazette has been released; topics covered include shell scripting, PyCon 2005 coverage, Crossover Office, and more.
Contests and Awards
Mozilla Foundation Pays Out Bug Bounties (MozillaZine)
The Mozilla Foundation has announced that Michael Krax has won cash prizes for finding five security bugs in the latest Mozilla bug bounty.
Upcoming Events
FUDCon2 @ LinuxTag, 24-25 June 2005, Call For Papers
A Call For Papers has gone out for FUDCon2, the event will be held on June 24-25, 2005 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Papers are due by April 22.Upcoming Lisp conferences
Three new Lisp language conferences have been scheduled for the next four months. "The events are the European Common Lisp Meeting, the International Lisp Conference, and the 2nd European LISP and Scheme Workshop."
samba eXPerience 2005
Samba eXPerience 2005 will be held on May 2-4, 2005 in Göttingen, Germany.YAPC::NA 2nd Call-for-Papers (use Perl)
Use Perl has posted a reminder that papers are soon due for YAPC::NA: "the Call-For-Papers deadline for Yet Another Perl Conference North America 2005 in Toronto is April 18".
Events: April 7 - June 2, 2005
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| April 7 - 8, 2005 | Black Hat Briefings Asia 2005 | Singapore |
| April 7, 2005 | FOSE 2005 | (Washington D.C. Convention Center)Washington, D.C. |
| April 8 - 10, 2005 | notanothercon(notacon) | (Holiday Inn Select Cleveland)Cleveland, Ohio |
| April 10 - 15, 2005 | 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference | Anaheim, California, USA |
| April 12 - 15, 2005 | Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference 2005 | (Westin Hotel)Seattle, WA |
| April 15 - 17, 2005 | Debian Edu/Skolelinux workshop | (Nafplion)Athens, Greece |
| April 18 - 23, 2005 | linux.conf.au 2005 | (Australian National University)Canberra, Australia |
| April 18 - 21, 2005 | MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2005 | (Santa Clara Convention Center)Santa Clara, CA |
| April 18 - 20, 2005 | LinuxWorld Conference and Expo 2005 | (Metro Toronto Convention Centre)Toronto, ON |
| April 18 - 19, 2005 | Debian Miniconf 4 | Canberra, Australia |
| April 19 - 20, 2005 | San Francisco techCongress | (Rickey's Hyatt)Palo Alto, CA |
| April 20 - 23, 2005 | ACCU Conference 2005 | (Randolph Hotel)Oxford, England |
| April 21 - 24, 2005 | 3rd International Linux Audio Conference(LAC2005) | (Center for Art and Media (ZKM))Karlsruhe, Germany |
| April 21 - 23, 2005 | WebTech 2005 | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| April 23 - 24, 2005 | LayerOne Technology Conference | (Pasadena Hilton)Pasadena, CA |
| April 25 - 30, 2005 | UbuntuDownUnder | Sydney, Australia |
| April 30, 2005 | Hurricane Electric Linux Security Seminar | Fremont, CA |
| May 2 - 7, 2005 | DallasCon 2005 | (Richardson Hotel)Dallas, TX |
| May 2 - 4, 2005 | Samba eXPerience 2005 | (Hotel Freizeit)Göttingen - Germany |
| May 2 - 5, 2005 | International PHP Conference | (RAI Conference Center)Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
| May 4 - 6, 2005 | CanSecWest/core05 | Vancouver, B.C. |
| May 11 - 15, 2005 | php|tropics 2005 | (Moon Palace Resort)Cancun, Mexico |
| May 13 - 14, 2005 | BSDCan 2005 | (University of Ottawa)Ottawa, Canada |
| May 19 - 21, 2005 | GUADEC-es 2005 | A Coruña, Spain |
| May 22 - 25, 2005 | Gelato Federation Meeting | (HP's Palo Alto and Cupertino campuses)San Jose, CA |
| May 23 - 26, 2005 | PalmSource Worldwide Mobile Summit and DevCon | (Fairmont Hotel)San Jose, California |
| May 24 - 27, 2005 | XTech 2005 Conference | (Amsterdam RAI Center)Amsterdam, the Netherlands |
| May 25 - 26, 2005 | Linux World New York Summit 2005 | (New York City Marriott Marquis)New York, NY |
| May 29 - 31, 2005 | GNOME Users and Developers European Conference(GUADEC 2005) | Stuttgart, Germany |
| June 1 - 3, 2005 | The Red Hat Summit 2005 | (Hilton New Orleans)New Orleans, LA |
| June 1 - 4, 2005 | Fórum Internacional Software Livre(FISL) | Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil |
Web sites
O'Reilly Launches CodeZoo Open Source Component and Information Site
O'Reilly has launched its new CodeZoo site. "O'Reilly Media's new CodeZoo (www.codezoo.net) offers a repository of components plus a rich mix of related information from O'Reilly and the CodeZoo community. Created to help developers build on--and expand--the body of useful code created by the open source community, CodeZoo saves developers from starting each new application from scratch by making high-quality components easily available."
Page editor: Forrest Cook