Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Creative Commons 3.0 licenses discussion started
The Creative Commons has begun the discussion on the upgrade of its licenses to version 3.0. "[We] are looking to move ahead with versioning the CC licenses up to version 3.0 to improve the clarity of the terms of the licenses and to address some concerns of one of our first and very prominent license adopters - MIT, with their OpenCourseWare project, and to also take on board the concerns of the Debian group about the clarity of some provisions of our licenses." There are some remaining issues regarding the anti-DRM language; interested people might want to join the mailing list and comment on the drafts.
EFF: Innocent Target of File-Sharing Lawsuit Deserves Attorney's Fees
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a press release concerning the payment of legal fees for those wrongly accused of illegal file sharing. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with the American Association of Law Libraries, the ACLU, and Public Citizen, filed a brief with an Oklahoma district court Thursday, strongly urging a judge to award the innocent target of a file-sharing lawsuit the cost of her attorney's fees in battling the baseless allegations of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The RIAA sued Deborah Foster in November of 2004, accusing her of illegally downloading copyrighted material. Foster denied the allegations and fought back in court, and the case was dismissed. But many others who are falsely accused accept settlement offers from the RIAA because the cost of settling the case is less than what they might spend defending themselves."
Linuxaudio.org announces new members
Linuxaudio.org has announced the joining of nine new members. "Linuxaudio.org is a not-for-profit consortium of libre software projects and artists, companies, institutions, organizations, and hardware vendors using Linux kernel-based systems and allied libre software for audio-related work, with an emphasis on professional tools for the music, production, recording, and broadcast industries. The consortium aims to co-ordinate joint projects between members, collaborate on the promotion of Linux based systems for audio tasks, offer programs beneficial to members and subsequently its mission, and provide a single point of contact for prospective industry partners."
OpenVZ for RHEL4
The OpenVZ Project has announced a special kernel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. RHEL users who want to play with bleeding-edge container technology can get checkpointing, live migration, virtual network drivers, and more. It is not clear how much of this work will ever make it into the mainline kernel, but it is undoubtedly an interesting set of features.
Commercial announcements
Active Voice Increases the Capacity and Reliability of Repartee LX
Active Voice has enhanced the Capacity and Reliability of its Repartee LX Unified Messaging Solution. "To address the needs of larger enterprise customers, such as hotels and resorts, hospitals, universities, and government offices, Repartee LX version 8.1.2 offers increased capacity to 60 ports from 40 ports, enabling it to support thousands of users. In addition, the new Repartee LX product supports the flexible Dell PowerEdge 2800 rack-mountable server with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), ideal for organizations seeking increased speed and performance, higher reliability and growth potential on their communications network."
Argus to support PitBull Foundation for SUSE Linux Enterprise
Argus Systems Group has announced that it will support PitBull Foundation for SUSE Linux Enterprise. "Users of the Argus solution will be able to implement multilevel security (MLS) on the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 platform from Novell. PitBull Foundation for Linux, which is compatible with the Linux 2.6 kernel, is being built on proven security technology. It will offer users the ability to protect Linux systems at the core of the system, from within the kernel."
Coverity technology helps Mozilla developers find bugs
Coverity tools have been scanning Mozilla code, Firefox in particular. ""The results of our analysis have shown that the Firefox browser is very high quality software, especially given how complex it is," said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity."
Digium receives first round of VC funding
Digium has announced the receipt of venture capital funding. "Digium, creator of Asterisk, the first open source telephony platform (PBX), has received its first round of VC funding, $13.8 million from Matrix Partners."
GarageGames Releases Version 1.1.1 of Torque Game Builder
GarageGames has announced the release of Torque Game Builder version 1.1.1. "Just over a month since the release of TGB 1.1.0, GarageGames is proud to present the first in a long line of updates, sporting many improvements and some new functionality!"
Ingres introduces Project Icebreaker
Ingres has announced their Project Icebreaker. "Ingres Corporation, the leading business open source database company, today unveiled Project Icebreaker, an integrated software maintenance unit that dramatically lowers the cost and complexity of database and operating system maintenance and support. The integration of the Ingres 2006 database with the Linux operating system enables a single, easy-to-manage environment where the operating system becomes transparent and support is provided by one point of contact and a unified maintenance stream."
Openwave and Trolltech Collaborate on Linux-Based Development Platform
Openwave Systems Inc. has announced a collaboration with Trolltech. "Openwave Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: OPWV), the leading provider of open software products and services for the communications industry, and Trolltech(R), the company that makes software faster to build and easier to use, today announced an agreement to port Openwave client software onto Trolltech's Qtopia Phone Edition Series 4. The Openwave technologies include the Openwave(R) Mobile Browser, Mercury Edition and Openwave(R) Mobile Integrated Dynamic Application System (MIDAS), a user experience engine."
Open-Xchange partners with SpikeSource
Open-Xchange is partnering with SpikeSource to Offer Spike Certified Solutions Smart Collaboration on Red Hat and SUSE Linux Stacks. "Open-Xchange Server 5 enables Smart Collaboration by providing mission critical collaborative functions like email, calendaring, contacts and task management - fully integrated with advanced groupware features such as Documail, Smart Linking, Smart Permissions, document sharing, project tracking, user forums, and a knowledge base. Open-Xchange Server 5 works with the widest variety of browsers, mobile devices and rich clients' such as Microsoft Outlook. Open-Xchange Server 5 is now available as a SpikeCertified business ready solution."
Oracle Enhances Oracle Validated Configurations
Oracle Corporation has announced an expansion of its Oracle Validated Configurations effort. "Oracle today announced the expansion of its Oracle(R) Validated Configurations effort with the addition of new configurations and partners -- Brocade, Cisco Systems and Pillar Data Systems. Now, customers will have access to a broader range of pre-tested and validated architectures .- software, hardware, storage and networking components .- to help accelerate and simplify their Oracle on Linux deployments."
OSDL and LiPS to Announce Formal Collaboration
Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) have announced that they will collaborate to reduce fragmentation in the mobile space and provide the industry with open, flexible and customizable Linux-based solutions. "This move will maximize the benefits of the organizations' complementary approaches: OSDL focuses on the kernel and operating system levels, and LiPS works on applications and service enabler layers."
The Portland Group Delivers a PGI CDK Roll for Rocks Clusters
STMicroelectronics has announced its PGI Cluster Development Kit. "The Portland Group(TM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a leading supplier of compilers and development tools for High-Performance Computing, today announced availability of its PGI Cluster Development Kit(TM) (CDK) in a roll configuration compatible with the popular Rocks cluster software distribution technology. The PGI CDK is a turn-key suite of software for building and testing programs designed to take advantage of the performance of Linux clusters."
SGI releases SGI ProPack 5
SGI has announced the release of SGI ProPack 5 for Linux, the latest version of its software supplement that boosts the capabilities and performance of Linux on SGI hardware.ACCESS and PalmSource LinuxWorld announcements
ACCESS CO., LTD and PalmSource, Inc. have announced the ACCESS Developer Network, an online resource designed to accelerate the creation, distribution and usage of mobile Linux applications for devices based on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP).PalmSource, Inc. has announced it is releasing its recently created software library known as libsqlfs, under a Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Penguin Computing Ships Scyld ClusterWare HPC
Penguin Computing, Inc. has announced the release of its Scyld ClusterWare platform. "Penguin Computing, the leader in Cluster Virtualization, today announced availability of its new Scyld ClusterWare(TM) platform, which provides a virtualized cluster environment that is so easy to manage, even non-system administrators can run a cluster. This simplicity of management and scalability is a result of Scyld ClusterWare HPC's innovative, single point command/control architecture that has earned it Linux Journal Product Excellence Award finalist status Scyld ClusterWare HPC significantly improves system scalability while retaining overall simplicity of management with enhanced "just-in-time" provisioning."
rPath to launch 2.0 at LinuxWorld
rPath has announced the general availability of rBuilder 2.0. "This latest release of rPaths flagship product allows software developers to transform their applications into software appliances. A software appliance combines an application with a tailored version of the Linux operating system and runs on industry standard hardware or in a virtualized environment."
LinuxWorld announcements
LinuxWorld San Francisco continues to be an occasion for commercial announcements. Here are a few of the press releases we have seen for August 15th:- Open Source Development Labs announced the availability of the results of a 'Linux in the Channel' Study.
- Penguin Computing announced its new Altus 1600 and 2600 servers with AMD Opteron processors.
- Hummingbird Ltd. unveiled its X11 remote access application solution for Linux desktops.
- Collax launched the Collax Business Server.
- Open Source Systems (formerly Open Source Storage) announced a new line of double-density Gemini servers with AMD Opteron processors.
- The Cleversafe project launched a new open source project, called the DSGrid File System (dsgfs), to allow a dispersed storage grid to appear as a mountable file system for Linux-based software applications.
- FiveRuns released its Systems Management solution, a hosted Web 2.0 application using Ruby on Rails and Ajax technologies.
New Books
"Innovation Happens Elsewhere" under a CC license
The book Innovation Happens Elsewhere, by Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel, has been released under the Creative Commons noncommercial license. "This book is intended for anyone considering using Open Source. It describes what open source is, discusses business reasons for using open source, and describes how an open source project works in a day-to-day manner."
Resources
FSFE Newsletter
The August 10, 2006 edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe Newsletter is online. Topics include: SELF project officially launched, Second draft of the GPLv3 presented, Bernhard Reiter spoke at University of Bayreuth (Germany), Free Software at Campus Party in Valencia (Spain), Experts Meeting on Internet Governance Forum, Microsoft fined another 1.5m EUR per day, 280.5m EUR total and FSFE servers moved.LPI launches a Linux jobs service
The Linux Professional Institute has announced the launch of an "employment and contract matching service" for people registered with LPI. It is, in particular, aimed at matching those who pass the LPI certification exams with jobs, but one need not be certified to get into the database. There is no public site for the database; employers and recruiters seeking candidates will have to inquire about pricing before getting that information.
Calls for Presentations
SCALE 5x Calls For Papers (LinuxMedNews)
LinuxMedNews has announced a call for papers for the SCALE 5x conference. "Preparing for its 5th annual event, SCALE 5x, the Southern California Linux Expo has issued a call for papers. SCALE 5x will be held on Feb 10-11, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. Past speakers have included Chris Dibona, Jon "maddog" Hall, and Andrew Morton."
Upcoming Events
KDE-Edu Birds of a Feather Session at Akademy 2006 (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced the KDE-Edu Birds of a Feather Session, to be held at the Akademy conference in Dublin, Ireland on September 28. "This year in Dublin will host the annual meeting of the KDE community, and it will be a great occasion for developers to meet, code, hold bug-fixing sessions, discussions and much more. During the week of the conference, some KDE-Edu developers will meet to discuss themes including their future strategies of the module for the upcoming KDE 4, current applications, ideas for new ones and collaboration with other education-related projects, like SkoleLinux."
LinuxBIOS Symposium in Europe this year!
The LinuxBIOS project has announced a European symposium. "Join the firmware revolution! This year's LinuxBIOS symposium will take place on October 1-3 in Hamburg, Germany. We cordially invite you to participate. Expect to meet interesting people from all over the world, thrilling topics and exciting talks and discussion about LinuxBIOS."
Wizards of OS 4
"Information Freedom Rules" is the title of the 4th Wizards of OS conference, taking place in Berlin on 14-16 September 2006. Among the topics are the future of free software and the presence of free netlabel music, the freedom of art and the free culture nation Brazil. The rules to be discussed include copyright law and licenses, quality assurance in free information and regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum, an essential resource as we move into the mobile wireless era. Another essential resource is money. New rules for an economy based on free culture will be one of the focus issues of WOS4.Events: August 24, 2006 to October 23, 2006
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| August 21 August 27 |
Ireland PyPy sprint | Limerick, Ireland |
| August 23 August 24 |
Fourth International Conference on GPLv3 | Bangalore, India |
| August 26 | RubyConf*MI | Grand Rapids, MI |
| August 28 August 31 |
Bellua Cyber Security Asia 2006 | Jakarta, Indonesia |
| August 30 September 1 |
YAPC::EU 2006 - Yet Another Perl Conference - Birmingham | Birmingham, UK |
| September 5 September 8 |
Linux Kongress 2006, 13th International Linux System Technology Conference | Nürnburg, Germany |
| September 8 | Leipzig Python Workshop | Leipzig, Germany |
| September 9 September 10 |
Linuxtage in Essen | Essen, Germany |
| September 11 September 13 |
OpenOffice.org Conference | Lyon, France |
| September 12 September 15 |
php|works/db|works 2006 | Toronto, Canada |
| September 13 September 15 |
2006 WebGUI Users Conference | Las Vegas, NV |
| September 14 | NLUUG najaarsconferentie 2006 | Gelderland, The Netherlands |
| September 14 September 16 |
Wizards of OS 4 - Information Freedom Rules | Berlin, Germany |
| September 14 September 15 |
RailsConf Europe 2006 | London, UK |
| September 14 | Open Source: New DoD Paradigm, or Business as Usual? | Arlington, VA, USA |
| September 14 September 15 |
Software Tagging Workshop | Portland, OR, USA |
| September 16 September 17 |
WineConf | Reading, UK |
| September 16 September 17 |
Linux-Delhi (India Linux users group Delhi chapter) Freedel 2006 | Delhi, India |
| September 17 | KLDP 10 year Anniversary Free/Open Source Software Conference | Seoul, Korea |
| September 18 September 21 |
2006 European Open Source Convention | Brussels, Belgium |
| September 18 September 21 |
New Security Paradigms Workshop | Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany |
| September 19 September 21 |
High Performance Embedded Computing Workshop | Lexington, MA, USA |
| September 23 September 30 |
KDE World Summit 2006 | Dublin, Ireland |
| September 25 September 28 |
Embedded Systems Conference | Boston, MA |
| September 29 September 30 |
No cON Name 2006 Congress | Palma de Mallorca, Spain |
| September 29 October 1 |
ToorCon 2006 | San Diego, CA |
| September 29 October 1 |
Encuentro de Desarrolladores de GNOME Zaragoza | Zaragoza, Spain |
| September 30 October 1 |
RuxCon 2006 | Sydney, Australia |
| September 30 | Ohio LinuxFest 2006 | Columbus, Ohio |
| September 30 | Defective by Design, 2pm-5pm, Apple Store, Regent Street, London, UK | London, UK |
| October 1 October 4 |
Gelato ICE Itanium Conference and Expo | Biopolis, Singapore |
| October 1 October 3 |
LinuxBIOS Symposium 2006 | Hamburg, Germany |
| October 2 October 5 |
Security OPUS Infosec Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| October 7 October 9 |
GNOME Boston Summit | Boston, MA, USA |
| October 9 October 13 |
ApacheCon US | Austin, TX |
| October 9 October 13 |
13th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference | Naperville, IL |
| October 11 October 12 |
Eclipse Summit Europe | Esslingen, Germany |
| October 11 October 12 |
Linux World Conference and Expo | Utrecht, The Netherlands |
| October 12 October 15 |
Eighth Real-Time Linux Workshop | Lanzhou, Gansu, China |
| October 18 October 19 |
International Conference on IT-Incident Management and IT-Forensics | Stuttgart, Germany |
| October 18 October 22 |
Pike Conference 2006 | Riga, Latvia |
| October 19 October 21 |
HackLu 2006 | Kirchberg, Luxembourg |
| October 19 October 20 |
DC PHP Conference | Washington, D.C. |
| October 20 October 22 |
aLANtejo 06 | Évora, Portugal |
| October 20 October 22 |
RubyConf 2006 | Denver, Colorado |
| October 22 October 27 |
Colorado Software Summit | Keystone, CO, USA |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Web sites
GNOME Software in 3 Clicks (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org mentions the new GFiles.org site. "GFiles.org is a dedicated GTK/GNOME Linux software repository. At the present time repository include more than 1000 pupular GTK/GNOME applications. We are trying to increase number of software titles presented in our database. So, if you are an opensource author or commercial vendor please submit your applications on GFiles.org."
Yahoo launches Python developer network
Yahoo has launched a new Python developer network with links to Python resources, HOWTO articles, educational sites and community resources.
Page editor: Forrest Cook