Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
EFF: Friday Court Battle Over Telecom Lobbying Records
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sent out a press release regarding telecom lobbying records. "San Francisco - On Friday, November 30, at 9am, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal judge to speed the release of lobbying records that could shed light on the congressional debate over granting amnesty for telecommunications companies taking part in illegal electronic surveillance."
GNOME Foundation Elections 2007 launched (GnomeDesktop)
GnomeDesktop.org has announced the 2007 GNOME Foundation Elections. "The candidates were announced. This year, to make life easier for the candidates, the Membership Committee formulated the questions which will be answered on the GNOME Foundation mail list."
The GNOME Foundation on OOXML
Rather belatedly, the GNOME Foundation has sent out a statement regarding its participation in the OOXML standardization process. "We are deeply concerned that abuse of the standards process is eroding public trust in the value and independence of international standards. Both ODF and OOXML are very heavily influenced by their implementation heritage, neither are likely to deliver the 'one true office format', and both communities have - in their own way - played a role in this erosion of trust."
OLPC sued for patent infringement in Nigeria
A company called Lagos Analysis Corporation has sent out a press release announcing a patent infringement lawsuit against the One Laptop Per Child project. "The patent infringement lawsuit was filed on November 22nd, 2007 as a result of OLPC's willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent #RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops." The patent text is hard to find, but it seems to relate to the design of keyboards which facilitate the typing of text in multiple languages.
Commercial announcements
BitNami.org packages open-source web applications
BitNami has announced the launch of BitNami.org. "The BitNami team has just announced the launch of www.bitnami.org, built to help spread the adoption of freely available, high quality open source web applications. BitNami Stacks are downloadable, ready-to-run packages that make it easy to get started with open source applications by automating the installation and configuration process. This allows even non-technical users to be up and running with the software in under five minutes. BitNami currently hosts Stacks for blogging, bug-tracking, ECM, forums, portals, wikis and more."
NComputing releases products for Ubuntu
NComputing has announced the availability of its products on the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. "Joining its Windows-based offerings, the NComputing open-source solution allows schools and businesses worldwide to deploy full virtual PC stations, complete with hardware, software, the Ubuntu operating system and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, at unprecedented low costs by leveraging the excess power of their PCs and open-source license-free software."
New Books
Linux Networking Cookbook--New from O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly has published the book Linux Networking Cookbook by Carla Schroder.New Mobile Python Book
Wiley has published the book Mobile Python: Rapid Prototyping of Applications on the Mobile Platform by Jürgen Scheible and Ville Tuulos.Using Moodle, 2nd Edition--New from O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly has published the book Using Moodle, 2nd Edition by Jason Cole and Helen Foster.
Resources
"What every programmer should know about memory" - the PDF version
Ulrich Drepper has posted the full text of "What every programmer should know about memory" (recently serialized here on LWN) in PDF format. It's a 114 page, 900KB download full of good information.
Contests and Awards
The Google Highly Open Participation Contest
Google has launched a new project - the "Google Highly Open Participation Contest" - aimed at getting pre-university students into free software development. "Google will work with ten open source organizations -- Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS -- for this pilot effort, each of which will provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants." See the GHOP page for more information.
Calls for Presentations
Call for Contributions - Haskell Communities and Activities Report
A call for contributions has gone out for the December, 2007 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report. "Dear Haskellers, so much has happened in the Haskell world in the past months. Therefore, although later than usual, I would very much like to collect contributions for the 13th edition of the Haskell Communities & Activities Report". Submissions are due by December 7.
Call for Papers - Linux Clusters Institute Conference on High-Performance Computing
The Linux Clusters Institute Conference has announced (PDF) the call for papers for the 9th LCI International Conference on High-performance Clustered Computing. "This year's gathering will focus on the technical challenges facing the clustered computing community as we move into the petascale era. We will examine the promise of new technologies such as multi-core processors, acceleration coprocessors, advanced interconnects and high-performance I/O solutions. We will also explore the potential scaling and performance modifications necessary for systems, data and applications to achieve petascale class performance." The deadline for submissions is December 13, 2007. The conference runs April 28 - May 1, 2008, in Urbana Illinois, USA.
National Computer and Information Security Conferences CFP
A call for papers has gone out for the National Computer and Information Security Conferences ACIS 2008. The event takes place in Bogotá, D.C, Columbia on June 18-20, 2008. Submissions are due by March 28.NLUUG spring conference call for papers
A call for papers has gone out for the NLUUG spring conference. "NLUUG (formerly the Unix User Group, the Netherlands) will organize a conference about security on May 15 in Ede, the Netherlands. The program committee is looking for speakers with an interesting story to tell."
Reminder: So Cal Linux Exp Call For Papers closes Friday
The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) call for papers closes on Friday, November 30. "If you're contemplating submitting a paper for any of these session, don't delay - there are only a few speaker slots left."
Upcoming Events
FOSS.IN/2007 Talk Schedules
The schedule for talks at FOSS.IN is out. The conference starts on 4 December in Bangalore, India and features many technical talks from some of the most well-known free software community members.The next LF Collaboration Summit
The next Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit will be held in Austin, Texas on April 8-10, 2008. "The Summit will be April 8 - 10, 2008. The format will be similar to last year: April 8th will be a general day with panels and general discussion and the inclusion of press and analysts. (And a social event!) Days two and three will hold workgroup meetings (such as DAM, LSB, CGL, etc) and collaboration sessions."
Events: December 6, 2007 to February 4, 2008
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| December 4 December 8 |
FOSS.IN 2007 | Bangalore, India |
| December 7 December 8 |
Free Software Conference Scandinavia | Gotherburg, Sweden |
| December 7 December 8 |
PGCon Brazil | Sao Paulo, Brazil |
| December 10 | Paris on Rails (2nd Edition) | Paris, France |
| December 11 December 12 |
3rd DoD Open Conference: Deployment of Open Technologies and Architectures within Military Systems | Vienna, VA, USA |
| December 15 December 22 |
Unix Meeting 2007 | IRC, Worldwide |
| December 27 December 30 |
24th Chaos Communication Congress | Berlin, Germany |
| December 31 | Israeli Perl Workshop | Ramat Efal, Israel |
| January 11 January 13 |
FUDCon Raleigh 2008 | Raleigh, NC, USA |
| January 16 January 17 |
QualiPSo Conference 2008 | Rome, Italy |
| January 17 January 19 |
KDE 4 release event | Mountain View, CA, USA |
| January 24 | Federal DBA Day | Washington DC, USA |
| January 28 February 2 |
Linux.conf.au 2008 | Melbourne, Australia |
| January 28 February 1 |
Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| January 29 January 31 |
Solution Linux 2008 | Paris, France |
| February 1 | Open Island | Belfast, United Kingdom |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Web sites
Announcing the OpenOffice.org Community Forum
The OpenOffice.org Community Forum has been launched. "This new Forum goes beyond being simply a knowledge base of questions and answers and is rather a place for OpenOffice.org users to interact freely with each other. The Forum has been established by a team of enthusiasts who bring a wealth of expertise gained in providing OpenOffice.org forum-based support. Initially launched in English, the new platform has the capability to support multiple languages in future."
Audio and Video programs
LugRadio Season 5 Episode 5 - 'A Quality Production'
LugRadio fans can now download LugRadio Season 5 Episode 5 - "A Quality Production" "Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Chris Proctor and Adam Sweet talk about Linux, open source, and all manner of associated things." This show includes an interview with Havoc Pennington and Colin Walters from Red Hat about the Gnome Online Desktop project, a discussion on the need for rockstar programmers, and much more.
PyCon 2007 audio podcasts announced
A series of audio podcasts from the 2007 PyCon conference are being made available. "After many delays, we've begun posting recordings of talks from PyCon 2007 as a podcast, roughly one talk per week."
Page editor: Forrest Cook