Announcements

Two new initiatives from the FSF

The Free Software Foundation has announced the creation of an "activist campaigns team" to try to spread the word on software freedom. This group will be run by John Sullivan and Joshua Gay; it will start by managing the BadVista.org and Defective By Design efforts.

There is also a new campaign called PlayOGG.org, intended to promote use of the Ogg Vorbis audio format. "OGG is your safest bet to be free from patent litigation when using compressed audio. This is especially true given the recent upswing in patent-based lawsuits. What is most frightening, and underscores the landmine metaphor often used to describe software patents, is the recent $1.5B preliminary judgment against Microsoft. Microsoft thought it had a paid-up nonexclusive license to practice the patents in MP3. This judgment demonstrates that there is no good way to protect yourself from these threats. The only viable solution right now is to switch to OGG, and work for the abolition of software patents."

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Announcing CrossOver 6.1 for Linux and Mac

CodeWeavers has announced the availability of version 6.1 of CrossOver Mac and CrossOver Linux. "Version 6.1 includes a lot of improvements from 6.0; while many applications should be affected by these improvements, the biggest improvements will be in Outlook 2003 as well as in our 3D game support. The major change in Outlook includes support for RPC over HTTP, to enable people the check their email from outside the office. There is also a wide range of other bug fixes and minor improvements in Outlook."

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The DMCA requires use of DRM?

This must be the strangest use of the DMCA yet: here's a press release from two companies called Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com about the cease-and-desist letter they have sent to companies like Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. It seems those companies are committing the crime of not using MRT's DRM products. "MRT asserts Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe have produced billions of these products without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American Intellectual Property owners, actively avoiding the use of MRT's technologies. Failure to comply with this demand could result in a federal court injunction to any of the above named parties to cease production or sale of their products and/or the imposition of statutory damages of at least $200 to $2500 for each product distributed or sold."

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EMC enhances support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

EMC Corporation has announced its enhanced support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. "EMC Corporation announced today at the Red Hat Summit that it has strengthened support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments by completing interoperability qualification of core EMC(R) platforms including EMC Symmetrix(R), EMC CLARiiON(R), EMC Celerra(R), and EMC Invista(R). EMC worked with Red Hat engineers to extensively test Red Hat Enterprise Linux interoperability with EMC's core storage platforms in the EMC E-Lab(TM), the leading industry testing facility of its kind."

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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Intel has announced free driver software for the 965GM Express chip set. "The Intel 965GM Express Chipset represents the first mobile product that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. Extending Intel's commitment to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers, support for this new chipset is provided through the X.org 2.0 Intel driver and the Mesa 6.5.3 releases. These drivers represent significant work by both Intel and the broader open source community."

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Terra Soft Launches PS3 User Showcase

Terra Soft has launched the Share Your Story page. "Terra Soft today launched a program to engage its growing PS3 user base through the sharing of their unique stories on the Terra Soft Showcase web pages. As presented on the Terra Soft website, "You may be a super-geek, cranking out code into the midnight hour. Or you may be just like the rest of us, cranking out a mid term exam paper an hour before it's due. Either way, you have a story to tell, a unique experience to share. And if you are using YDL on a PLAYSTATION(R)3, an Apple PowerPC, or an IBM Power product, you are doing something the rest of us would like to hear about.""

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TimeSys Introduces LinuxLink subscriptions for Intel IXP435 processors

TimeSys has announced the availability of LinuxLink subscriptions for the Intel IXP435 line of processors. "This processor is a new addition to Intel's popular line of network processors and TimeSys is the only vendor to provide processor-optimized Linux packages and components for the IXP435. Through the partnership between Intel and TimeSys, customers have access to the LinuxLink service, which allows them to build and assemble their own commercial-grade custom Linux platforms based on the IXP435 processor."

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TimeSys Embedded supports 2.6.21 kernel

TimeSys claims to be the first embedded Linux vendor to support the version 2.6.21 kernel. "TimeSys Corporation, the leading service provider to developers in the embedded Linux market, today announced that LinuxLink by TimeSys is the first commercial embedded Linux offering to deliver support for the 2.6.21 Linux kernel. LinuxLink is a web-based subscription service that simplifies embedded Linux development by providing the optimized code, tools and support that organizations need to accelerate their development and reduce their time to market."

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Zenoss among open-source leaders selected for Red Hat Exchange Launch

Zenoss Inc. has announced it is among the short list of partners involved in the launch of Red Hat Exchange (RHX). RHX allows companies to find, purchase and manage enterprise-ready open source software solutions through a single, trusted source - Red Hat.

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SitePoint releases "The Art and Science of CSS"

SitePoint has published the book The Art & Science of CSS by Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith and Jonathan Snook.

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Foundations of GTK Development published

The book Foundations of GTK Development by Andrew Krause has been published.

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O'Reilly Publishes 'Programming Firefox' by Kenneth Feldt (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on O'Reilly's publishing of the book Programming Firefox by Kenneth Feldt. "Subtitled Building Applications in the Browser, the new book by Kenneth Feldt covers using XUL and XPCOM to build Internet applications and extensions for Mozilla Firefox."

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FSFE Newsletter

The May 12, 2007 edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe Newsletter is online, here is the table of contents: "1. FSFE launches list of recommended Free Software lawyers 2. FSFE action on IPRED2 "Criminalisation" Directive 3. Transcript of Richard M. Stallman's speech in Brussels online 4. FSFE at A2K2 conference in Yale Law School 5. Georg Greve and Jonas Öberg in Belgrade, Serbia 6. Ivan Jelic joining European Core Team of FSFE 7. Merchandise available via web order 8. Get active: join the translation team!"

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IMF 2007 - CFP deadline extension

The call for papers deadline for the 3rd International Conference on IT-Incident Management & IT-Forensics has been extended to June 4, 2007. The event takes place in Stuttgart, Germany on September 11-12, 2007.

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OpenLogic to Host Webinar on Impact of GPLv3

OpenLogic, Inc. has announced a webinar on GPLv3 featuring Eben Moglen on Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 6 p.m. GMT. "Participants in this webinar will learn first-hand how changes to the GPL could impact enterprise organizations. Discussion topics will include differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3 (including simplification, internalization, patent defense clauses, digital rights management, and GPL- covered devices in consumer products), what GPLv3 means to enterprises committed to free and open source (including the future for open source projects that switch to GPLv3 versus stay with GPLv2), and what's in store for the release (including projected release date and the anticipated level of adoption)."

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Maker Faire: 400 Makers, 40,000 Attendees, 200,000 Sq. Ft. of DIY Mayhem

O'Reilly has sent out a press release for the 2007 Maker Faire. "The 2nd Annual Bay Area Maker Faire (May 19 & 20) at the San Mateo Fairgrounds in northern California is just 10 days away, and this year's event is shaping up to be even better than last year's award-winning DIY fiesta! This year's event will have twice as many Makers (400), twice as many fans (40,000 anticipated), and twice the terrain (200,000 square feet)."

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Mozilla Developer Day Paris: June 23, 2007

The next Mozilla Developer Day will take place in Paris, France on June 23, 2007. "As mentioned in a couple of the Mozilla Project Update meetings, we’re going to have our third Developer Day of 2007 in Paris, on June 23rd. You can read more details on the wiki page — including a place to indicate if you’re interested in attending! Also, there’s a page for proposing a topic that you’d like to discuss with other Mozilla developers, or for indicating that you’ve got something to demo."

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Events: May 24, 2007 to July 23, 2007

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
May 14 May 25	The Pure Data Spring School 2007	Glasgow, Scotland
May 21 May 25	Python Bootcamp with David Beazley	Atlanta, USA
May 22 May 24	Linux Days 2007, Geneva	Geneva, Switzerland
May 23 May 24	PGCon 2007	Ottawa, ON, Canada
May 25	Linuxwochen Austria - Krems	Krems, Austria
May 26	PAKCON III	Karachi, Pakistan
May 29 May 30	Where 2.0 Conference	San Jose, CA, USA
May 29 May 31	European ADempiere Developers Conference	Berlin, Germany
May 29 May 30	I FLOSS CONFERENCE RESISTENCIA	Resistencia, Argentina
May 30 June 2	Linuxtag	Berlin, Germany
May 30 June 1	3rd UNIX Days Conference - Gdansk 2007	Gdansk, Poland
May 30 June 1	Linuxwochen Austria - Wien	Wien, Austria
June 2 June 3	Journées Python Francophones	Paris, France
June 9 June 10	PyCon Uno - First Python Italian conference	Florence, Italy
June 10 June 15	DebCamp	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 10	Pluto Meeting 2007	Padova, Italy
June 11 June 14	Third International Conference on Open Source Systems	Limerick, Ireland
June 13 June 15	Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit	Mountain View, CA, USA
June 16	DebianDay	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 16	Firefox Developer Conference	Tokyo, Japan
June 17 June 23	Debian Developer Conference	Edinburgh, Scotland
June 17 June 22	2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference	Santa Clara, USA
June 18 June 20	O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference	San Jose, CA, USA
June 18 June 20	Advanced Workshop on GCC Internals	Bombay, India
June 20 June 22	IT Underground	Dublin, Ireland
June 20	Open Source Showcase @ OpenAdvantage	Birmingham, UK
June 23	Mozilla Developer Day	Paris, France
June 25 June 27	SOA World Conference and Expo 2007	New York, NY, USA
June 27 June 30	2007 Linux Symposium	Ottawa, Canada
June 27 June 29	Summer School of Sound	Lancaster, UK
June 29	NLUUG event theme innovation Enschede	Enschede, the Netherlands
June 30 July 7	Akademy 2007	Glasgow, Scotland
July 2 July 6	Learning Programming with PHP	Redditch, Worcestershire, UK
July 6	II WHYFLOSS CONFERENCE MADRID	Madrid, Spain
July 7	Italian PostgreSQL Day	Prato, Tuscany, Italy
July 7 July 8	LugRadio Live 2007	Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
July 9 July 11	EuroPython 2007	Vilnius, Lithuania
July 9 July 13	PostgreSQL 8.2 Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, USA
July 10 July 11	The Linux Foundation Japan Symposium	Tokyo, Japan
July 12 July 13	IV GUADEC-ES	Granada, Spain
July 12 July 13	DIMVA 2007	Lucerne, Switzerland
July 14	UK Gentoo Meeting 2007	London, UK
July 15 July 21	GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference	Birmingham, England
July 18 July 20	GCC and GNU Toolchain Developers' Summit	Ottawa, Canada
July 22 July 24	Ubuntu Live	Portland, OR, USA

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

New Pre-Release Firefox and Thunderbird announcement lists (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine reports on the creation of a number of new mailing lists for pre-release versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. "The Mozilla Developer News weblog has announced the creation of several new mailing lists for pre-release versions of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Users who are interested in testing pre-release builds, such as release candidates and alphas, can subscribe to the announce-prerelease list to receive early notifications when such pre-release builds are made available."

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Polish KDE Community Announces KDE.org.pl Web Site (KDE.News)

KDE.News has announced the new Polish KDE site. "The Polish community of KDE is growing year after year. In association with KDE e.V. we're proud to announce the launch of the KDE.org.pl web site, with ambitions of becoming the starting point for the KDE element of Poland."

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Official Mozilla Corporation Weblog in the Works (MozillaZine)

MozillaZine notes plans to launch an official Mozilla Corporation weblog. "A project of the Mozilla marketing team, the new weblog will present the official Mozilla Corporation line on news and developments in the Mozilla ecosystem. The target audience for the weblog will be broad, encompassing users, community members, journalists and weblog authors. It is expected to launch by the end of May."

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