Announcements

The Council of the EU does not support Linux

It seems that the Council of the European Union has a streaming service so that people can watch the meetings. That's a great idea, but they are using a proprietary format for the feed so that it can only be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. From the FAQ: A petition has been created by Stefan Esterer, asking the council to make the feed available to all by using a free codec. So if you are in the European Union and would like to watch the council meetings you should consider signing the petition.

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The Free Ryzom campaign is unsuccessful

The Free Ryzom Campaign has announced that its bid to buy the Ryzom game from its bankrupt creator was turned down by the court. "At the end, there were three offers presented, and the other two were bigger than our's. They are keeping more employees than we do, and offer more money." The project is now discussing how it could continue and achieve its goal of creating a free multi-player online game. With the energy and resources they have pulled together, they could yet do interesting things. (Thanks to Dafydd Walters).

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Nouveau driver pledge

The nouveau driver project is working on an open source 3D acceleration driver for nVidia cards. To help out the project David Nielsen has started a pledge drive. He's looking for 1000 people to each pledge $10 USD by February 8, 2007.

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OLPC announces its user interface

The One Laptop Per Child project has sent out a press release proclaiming the virtues of the user interface it has developed. "The Sugar UI, jointly developed with Red Hat and Pentagram, is the first to have been purpose-built as an educational environment for children using laptops. It is designed to support the learning experiences of elementary- and secondary-school children in poor, often rural communities by providing them with opportunities to freely explore, experiment and express themselves."

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Rwanda to deploy OLPC systems

The One Laptop Per Child project has announced that Rwanda will be rolling out OLPC systems. "In recognition of children being Rwanda's most precious natural resource, the government of Rwanda has committed to provide one laptop per child to all primary school children within five years."

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Digium launches AsteriskNOW

Digium has announced the availability of "AsteriskNOW," a version of Asterisk bundled with an (unspecified) Linux distribution. It is claimed that, with AsteriskNOW, a functioning Asterisk phone system can be up and running within 30 minutes.

All the software is GPL, but registration is required to download it. Worse, registration requires agreeing to terms of use including this gem: "Digium hereby authorizes you to copy materials published by Digium on the Website solely for non-commercial use by you or internally within your organization (or if you are a Digium Distributor or Partner, your customer's organization) solely in support of Digium products. No other use of the information is authorized."

Update: the problem with the terms of use has been fixed.

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eyeon Software Ships Fusion for Linux

eyeon Software has announced the availability of Fusion for Linux. Fusion is a visual effects software system. "Based on the recent December release of version 5.1, Fusion on Linux is the company’s next universal platform initiative. “We have been working hard on Fusion Linux, discovering along the way the necessary changes required to provide a product equal to the task of both the Fusion and Linux communities. And we’re really proud to deliver this in time for the holidays… I need some sleep and a beer.”"

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OpenRPT 2.0 open-source report writer announced

OpenMFG has announced version 2.0 of OpenRPT, a dual-licensed report writer. "OpenRPT 2.0 was retooled from the ground up to take full advantage of the underlying Qt 4 framework. Qt is an open source, comprehensive development framework that includes an extensive array of features, capabilities and tools that enable development of high-performance, cross-platform rich-client and server-side applications. Among the new OpenRPT features enabled by updating from Qt 3 to Qt 4 is the ability to export to Adobe PDF natively for both the OpenRPT API and the rendering application."

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Open Source Virtualization for Sun UltraSPARC T1

The OpenVZ project now runs on the Sun UltraSPARC T1 processor. "The OpenVZ project today announced its open source virtualization software is available for servers using Sun's breakthrough UltraSPARC(r) T1 CoolThreads(TM) processor. The operating system-level server virtualization software technology helps increase server utilization rates."

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Red Hat Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2007 Results

Red Hat has announced their third quarter FY2007 financial results. " Total revenue for the quarter was $105.8 million, an increase of 45% from the year-ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $88.9 million, up 48% year-over-year and 5% sequentially. Net income for the quarter was $14.6 million or $0.07 per diluted share compared with $11.0 million or $0.05 per diluted share for the prior quarter. Non-GAAP adjusted net income for the quarter was $29.6 million, or $0.14 per diluted share, after adjusting for stock compensation and tax expense as detailed in the tables below. This compares to non-GAAP adjusted net income of $22.7 million, or $0.11 per diluted share in the third quarter of last fiscal year."

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“Commercial” is not the opposite of Free-Libre / Open Source Software

David A. Wheeler presents an essay that looks at how commercial and open-source software are not mutually exclusive entities. "When I talk with with other people about Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS), I still hear a lot of people mistakenly use the term “commercial software” as if it had the opposite meaning of FLOSS (aka open source software, Free-Libre Software, or OSS/FS). That’s in spite of the rise in commercial development and support for FLOSS, most FLOSS projects’ goal to incorporate improvements, which are actually a form of financial gain, official definitions of “commercial item” that include FLOSS, and FLOSS licenses and projects that clearly approve of commercial support. Terms like “closed source” or “proprietary software” are plausible antonyms of FLOSS, but “commercial” is absurd as an antonym."

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Voting Has Opened for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

LinuxQuestions.org has announced that voting for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 21 categories this year, including Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on February 18th and the winners will be announced shortly after.

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BasKet Note Pads Usability Survey (KDE.News)

KDE.News has announced a new survey for BasKet Note Pads. "The aim of the BasKet Usability Project is to improve the usability of the BasKet Note Pads tool. Usability, as I (the project maintainer) see it, not only depends on the user interface, but also on the underlying assumptions that are made about the users and their context of use. So, knowledge of users, their contexts and claims are of vital importance for improving usability."

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Test Your Knowledge of Samba Topics (Sys Admin)

Sys Admin has published a free Samba quiz. "Samba is one of those technologies that you must know if you are working with integration today. Its importance is such that it is a focal point of the newly announced LPIC-3 certification from the Linux Professional Institute. Following are fifty questions on general aspects of Samba that anyone working with it at an advanced level should know. Good luck (answers are at the end of the article)!"

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ICMC 2007 call for participation

A call for participation has gone out for ICMC 2007, the International Computer Music Conference. "We are pleased to announce the general call for submission to the International Computer Music Conference 2007, which will take place at Holmen Island in Copenhagen starting Monday, August 27 and ending Saturday, September 1st, 2007. We invite original contributions in all areas of the computer music field in a number of formats. We are also open to any proposal, and encourage all submissions, including those that do not fit the categories below." The submission deadline is April 30.

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SambaXP 2007 Call For Papers

A call for papers has gone out for SambaXP 2007. "From April 23th to 25th 2007 developers and users will meet again in Goettingen, Germany at the sixth international SAMBA conference, the "samba eXPerience 2007"." Papers are due by February 5.

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ShmooCon, Washington DC call for papers

The next ShmooCon will take place in Washington DC on March 23-25, 2007. Papers are due by mid January.

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The O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference

O'Reilly has announced the 2007 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference along with a call for proposals. "To raise the level of technology knowledge in the publishing industry and to provide a meeting ground for those leading the charge into the future of publishing, O'Reilly Media is launching the first Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) Conference. The TOC Conference will take place June 18-20, 2007 in San Jose, California. The call for participation is now open; proposals are due no later than January 22, 2007."

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European Patent Conference, Brussels

The European Patent Conference will take place in Brussels, Belgium on January 24, 2007. "EUPACO-1 is the second in a series of events aimed at constructing a new European patent system through dialogue and collaboration based on research and data."

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Call for Location OOoCon 2007 - Deadline Extended

A call for location has gone out for the 2007 OpenOffice.org Conference. "The annual OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) continues to go from strength to strength, with this year's glittering event in Lyon, France attracting over 600 registrations and enjoying a civic reception laid on by the Mayor of Lyon in the historic town hall. Can your team do even better next year?" The deadline for choosing the location has been extended to January 31, 2007.

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Events: January 11, 2007 to March 12, 2007

The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.

Date(s)	Event	Location
January 11 January 12	Foundations of Open Media Software	Sydney, Australia
January 15 January 20	linux.conf.au 2007	Sydney, Australia
January 20 January 26	Cell Hack-a-thon	Loveland, CO, USA
January 23 January 26	Open Source Meets Business	Nürnberg, Germany
January 24	European Patent Conference	Brussels, Belgium
January 30 February 1	Solutions Linux Expo	Paris, France
February 1 February 2	LinuxDays Luxembourg	Luxembourg, Luxembourg
February 2	FUDCon Boston 2007	Boston, MA, USA
February 7 February 9	Free Software World Conference 3.0	Badajoz, Spain
February 7 February 9	Xorg Developer's Conference	Santa Clara, CA, USA
February 9	Women In Open Source	Los Angeles, USA
February 9	Open Source Health Care Summit	Los Angeles, USA
February 10 February 11	2007 Southern California Linux Expo	Los Angeles, USA
February 12 February 13	Vancouver PHP Conference	Vancouver, BC, Canada
February 12 February 13	Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop	San Jose, CA, USA
February 12 February 16	Ruby on Rails Bootcamp Training	Atlanta, USA
February 12 February 15	3GSM World Congress 2007	Barcelona, Spain
February 14 February 15	LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit	New York, NY, USA
February 15	TiE Open Source Summit	Pittsburgh, PA, USA
February 16	The Ubucon New York	New York, NY, USA
February 19 February 23	DebianEDU DevCamp	Soissons, France
February 22	PyCon Tutorial Day	Addison, Texas
February 22	CELF Japan Linux Technical Jamboree #13	Tokyo, Japan
February 22 February 24	OpenMind 2007	San Giorgio a Cremano, Naples, Italy
February 23 February 25	PyCon 2007	Addison, Texas
February 23	PHP Conference UK 2007	London, England
February 24 February 25	Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting	Brussels, Belgium
February 24 February 25	Java/DevJam/2007/Fosdem	Brussels, Belgium
February 26 March 1	PyCon Sprints	Addison, Texas
February 26 March 2	PHP5 Bootcamp Training at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
February 27 March 1	O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference	San Francisco, CA
February 27 March 2	EUSecWest Applied Security Conference	London, UK
February 28 March 2	Network and Distributed System Security Symposium	San Diego, CA, USA
March 2 March 3	LinuxForum 2007	Copenhagen, Denmark
March 3 March 8	O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference	San Diego, CA, USA
March 5 March 8	EclipseCon 2007	Santa Clara, CA, USA
March 5 March 6	Karlsruhe Workshop on Software Radios	Karlsruhe, Germany
March 8 March 10	2007 Open Source Think Tank	Napa, CA, USA
March 10 March 13	Camp 5 Advanced Zope3 Training	Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.

GNU Herds - Free Software Association

The GNU Herds site has been launched. "GNU Herds is a not-for-profit and true-democratic association which aims to encourage the professional development of Free Software contributors."

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