Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Apache Directory Server 1.0 LDAP Certified by the Open Group
Apache Software Foundation has announced the second year of LDAP certification for the Apache Software Foundation's Directory Project. "The Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) Directory Project today announced its continued certification to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) product standard as defined by The Open Group. The Apache Directory Server 1.0 (ApacheDS) is the first and, currently, only Open Source LDAP server among several certified commercial directory solutions."
Noted computer crime attorney comes to EFF
Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the hiring of Jennifer Stisa Granick as its Civil Liberties Director. "Noted computer crime attorney Jennifer Stisa Granick has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as its new Civil Liberties Director, working on government surveillance, Fourth Amendment, computer security, and computer crime law. Granick previously was Executive Director at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society as well as Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic."
IBM joins OpenOffice.org community
OpenOffice.org has announced that IBM has joined the community and plans to assist in the development of the office software. "IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products."
Commercial announcements
AMD releases initial GPU specs
As noted by David Airlie, AMD has made an initial set of specifications for ATI graphics processors available. These are 2D specifications, so they are not all that is needed to write a complete graphics driver, but they are a good start.Australia To Join Mandriva Partner Ecosystem
Mandriva has announced the launch of Mandriva Australia. "The Australian Market is ready for Linux expansion: about 50% of servers in Australia currently operate on Linux. The huge growth of Linux in China will in the near future give great impetus to the availability of Linux-based hardware and drivers for Australia. For this partnership, Mandriva has selected ArnSys Pty Ldt for its expertise".
Microsoft delivers Silverlight 1.0, extends support to Linux
Microsoft Corp. has announced the launch of Silverlight(TM) 1.0, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in that aims to compete with Adobe's Flash. "In addition, Microsoft will work with Novell Inc. to deliver Silverlight support for Linux, called Moonlight, and based on the project started on mono-project.com. Silverlight significantly reduces development and deployment costs and provides enhanced Web audio and video streaming and playback using industry-leading Windows Media(R) Technologies."
Microsoft and Novell open shared lab
The Microsoft/Novell deal rolls forward with this announcement of the opening of a shared "interoperability lab". "Located in Cambridge, the 2,500-square-foot lab and workspace will be home to a combined team of the best and brightest Microsoft and Novell engineers focused on making Windows Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise work better together. The first priority for the lab team will be to ensure interoperability between Microsoft and Novell virtualization technologies. Additional work will include standards-based systems management, identity federation and compatibility of office document formats."
OpenMoko Neo 1973 phones by Christmas?
The OpenMoko wiki has an updated schedule that shows the phones reaching customers by 25 December. There is also more information about the new hardware (WiFi, faster processor, accelerometers, and more). "We will sell this device through multiple channels. Direct from openmoko.com, the price will be $450 for the Neo Base and $600 for Neo Advanced."
QNX source released - sort of
It would seem that QNX is feeling the pressure from Linux; the company has just announced that it will be making the source for its "Neutrino" realtime operating system available under a "hybrid" license. "Not only can developers view the QNX Neutrino source code, but they can improve, modify, or extend that code for their own purposes or for the QNX community at large. They can then choose to offer back those changes to QNX Software Systems and the QNX development community or to keep their modifications private and proprietary." What they can't do is deploy the code commercially without paying royalties.
RedPost inc. launches Corktop software
RedPost inc. has launched Corktop, a networked digital signage application that runs under Linux. "Eric Kanagy, CEO, founded the company after discovering that digital signage is far too expensive and complicated. "Until now, places like Times Square have dominated digital signage -- you can spend millions of dollars on signage when you have a million people walking by every week. The local shoe store, coffee shop or bar can't afford a Times Square digital sign. Corktop is the beginning of a paradigm shift -- digital signage will be accessible to everyone.""
Sun acquires ClusterFS
Sun has announced the acquisition of Cluster File Systems. "Sun intends to add support for the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) on Lustre and plans to continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware platforms."
ThalesRaytheonSystems to provide Linux-based Battle Control System
ThalesRaytheonSystems has announced the winning of a $25.6 million contract with the US Air Force to upgrade the NORAD Battle Control System-Fixed (BCS-F), which controls the North American airspace. "Having common software and a common human-machine interface between the fixed and mobile communities will reduce development, testing, and training costs for the Air Force," said Daniel De Sollar, director of ThalesRaytheonSystems Air C2 Systems in the U.S. "The upgrades will not only ensure a common look and feel between today's BCS-F and the mobile command and control variant, but they will also convert to the Linux operating system in order to take advantage of the latest hardware available."
VMware Unveils VMware Tools as Open Source Software
VMware, Inc. has announced that it has released a majority of VMware Tools as open source software as part of the project Open Virtual Machine Tools. Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) is hosted at Sourceforge.
New Books
High Performance Web Sites--New from O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly has published the book High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders.The LEGO MINDSTORM NXT Idea Book--New from No Starch Press
No Starch Press has published the book The LEGO MINDSTORM NXT Idea Book by Martijn Boogaarts, Jonathan A. Daudelin, Brian L. Davis, Jim Kelly, David Levy, Lou Morris, Fay Rhodes, Rick Rhodes, Matthias Paul Scholz, Christopher R. Smith and Rob Torok.
Contests and Awards
Les Trophees du Libre
Les Trophées du Libre is a contest to reward innovative free software in six different categories: Security, Games/Multimedia, Education, Scientific software, Public sector software and Enterprise software. Register your project before October 1, 2007. Nominees will be announced on November 1, 2007 and the final deliberation of the jury and the award of prizes will take place on November 29, 2007 in Soissons, France.
Calls for Presentations
linux.conf.au Embedded Mini-conference 2008 CFP
An embedded Linux mini-conference is being announced for linux.conf.au, which is being held in Melbourne, Australia in January of 2008. The focus of the mini-conference is the diversity of embedded Linux devices. A call for papers for the event is also part of the announcement. Click below for more information.CFP: LCA Multimedia Miniconf
The LCA Multimedia Miniconf will take place on January 28, 2008. The submission deadline is November 30.
Upcoming Events
Worldwide Django sprint - September 14
A worldwide Django sprint has been announced. "On Friday, Sept. 14, 2007, we're going to hold a worldwide Django sprint -- an excuse for people to focus their undivided attention for a full day (or two) on improving Django. We've got a bunch of features that are almost done but haven't yet been committed/merged -- including newforms-admin, ORM aggregate support, multi-DB support and GeoDjango. Plus, we've got almost 1,000 open tickets in our ticket system. We plan to devote at least 24 hours of focused work to get some of this done in an organized fashion, and also to encourage new people to contribute. If all goes well on Friday, we'll probably continue to Saturday."
Technical program set for Gelato ICE Singapore
The technical program for the Gelato ICE conference has been announced. The conference takes place in Singapore on October 1-2, 2007.hack.lu 2007 speakers announced
The speaker line up for hack.lu 2007 has been announced, the event will take place in Luxembourg on October 18-20, 2007. "We managed again to have speakers from all over the world coming to Luxembourg, the small country in Europe. There is a large diversity of interesting topics covered during the three days of this intimate security conference."
KDE-EDU 4.0 Polishing on Saturday (KDE.News)
KDE.News has announced a polishing event for KDE-EDU, The KDE Education Project. "This Saturday (15.09.) will see the first KDE-EDU 4.0 Polishing Day. The aim is to allow direct communication between users and developers. Issues, doubts and new ideas can be discussed, solved and coded in real time. For this purpose, a meeting will be held in #kde-polishing from 8:00 to 15:00 UTC. KHangMan, KGeography and blinKen will be this first meetings subjects."
The Linux Foundation announces legal summits
The Linux Foundation has announced a pair of legal summits, to be held in October and sometime in the (northern hemisphere) spring. "At this invitation-only Summit, members will focus on the issues of greatest common interest with regards to open standards and licensing. Presentations and working sessions will focus on building a legal defense infrastructure for Linux and evolving intellectual property rights policies optimized to support open development models."
Sun Microsystems announces Tech Days Developer Conferences
Sun Microsystems, Inc. has announced the Sun Tech Days. "Sun Microsystems, Inc., today announced the details of the Sun Tech Days worldwide developer conferences for 2007-2008. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Sun Tech Days program -- a 15 city world tour designed to educate developers in local markets. Based on feedback from developers around the world, the Sun Tech Days program has been expanded to include content on Ajax and Web 2.0 related frameworks and toolkits, application performance tuning, JRuby, and building rich Web applications with jMaki and JavaFX Script.Events: September 20, 2007 to November 19, 2007
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
Date(s) Event Location September 18
September 21Embedded Systems Conference Boston, MA, USA September 18
September 20High Performance Embedded Computing Workshop Lexington, MA, USA September 19
September 21OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 Barcelona, Spain September 19
September 21Gartner Open Source Summit Las Vegas, NV, USA September 22
September 25Cell Hack-a-thon II Austin, TX, USA September 24
September 2714th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference New Orleans, USA September 24
September 25Power Architecture Developer Conference Austin, TX, USA September 24
September 27Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial 2007 Victoria, BC, Canada September 27
September 28Audio Mostly 2007 Ilmenau, Germany September 28
September 30Ohio LinuxFest 2007 Columbus, USA September 28
September 29Freed.in Delhi, India September 28 IRC discussion on AGPLv3 and GPLv3 online, world September 30
October 3Gelato ICE: Itanium® Conference & Expo Biopolis, Singapore, Singapore October 2
October 3Openmind 2007 Tampere, Finland October 3
October 5Apache Cocoon Get Together Rome, Italy October 6
October 7Wineconf 2007 Zurich, Switzerland October 6
October 8GNOME Boston Summit Boston, MA, USA October 7
October 9Graphing Social Patterns San Jose, CA, USA October 8
October 10VISION 2007 Embedded Linux Developer Conference Santa Clara, USA October 8 Embedded Linux Bootcamp for Beginners Santa Clara, CA, USA October 9
October 10Profoss Brussels, Belgium October 10
October 12Plone Conference 2007 Naples, Italy October 12 Legal Summit for Software Freedom New York, NY, USA October 13
October 14T-DOSE 2007 (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) Eindhoven, The Netherlands October 13 The Ontario Linux Fest Conference Toronto, Canada October 13 Aka Linux Kernel Developer Conference Beijing, China October 16 Databases and the Web London, England October 17
October 192007 WebGUI Users Conference Madison, WI, USA October 17
October 19Web 2.0 Summit San Francisco, CA, USA October 18
October 20HackLu 2007 Kirchberg, Luxembourg October 19
October 21ToorCon 9 San Diego, CA, USA October 20
October 21Ubucon.de Krefeld (Köln), Germany October 20 PostgreSQL Conference Fall 2007 Portland, OR, USA October 20 ./freedom & opensource day - PERU Lima, PERU October 21
October 25OOPSLA 2007 Montreal, Canada October 21
October 26Colorado Software Summit Keystone, CO, USA October 22
October 26OpenGL Bootcamp with Rocco Bowling Atlanta, GA, USA October 22
October 23She's Geeky - A Women's Tech (un)Conference Mountain View, CA, USA October 23
October 25Open aLANtejo 07 - CNSL07 Évora, Portugal October 23
October 26Black Hat Japan Tokyo, Japan October 25
October 26FSOSS 2007 - Free Software and Open Source Symposium Toronto, Canada October 27
October 28FOSSCamp 2007 Cambridge, MA, USA October 27 Linux Day Italy many cities around country, Italy October 28
November 2Ubuntu Developer Summit Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA October 29 3rd International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability Alexandria, VA, USA October 29
November 1Fall VON Conference and Expo Boston, MA, USA October 30
October 31BCS'07 Jakarta, Indonesia October 31
November 1LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Utrecht, Netherlands November 1
November 2The Linux Foundation Japan Symposium Tokyo, Japan November 2 5th ACM Workshop on Recurring Malcode Alexandria, VA, USA November 2
November 3Embedded Linux Conference, Europe Linz, Austria November 2
November 4Real-Time Linux Workshop Linz, Austria November 3 Linux-Info-Tag Dresden Dresden, Germany November 5
November 9Python Bootcamp with Dave Beazley Atlanta, USA November 7 NLUUG 25th anniversary conference Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, The Netherlands November 7 Alfresco North American Community Conference 2007 New York, NY, USA November 8
November 9Blog World Expo Las Vegas, NV, USA November 10
November 11Linuxtage Essen, NRW, Germany November 11
November 17Large Installation System Administration Conference Dallas, TX, USA November 12
November 16Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn Atlanta, USA November 12
November 15OWASP & WASC AppSec 2007 Conference San Jose, USA November 12
November 16ApacheCon US 2007 Atlanta, GA, USA November 13
November 14IV Latin American Free Software Conference Foz do Iguacu, Brazil November 15
November 18Piksel07 Bergen, Norway November 15 Alfresco European Community Conference Paris, France November 16
November 18aKademy-es 2007 Zaragoza, Spain If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Forrest Cook