Announcements

FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

The Free Software Foundation Europe has announced that the K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has adopted the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA). "The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court."

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Essentia Joins Open Solutions Alliance

Open Solutions Alliance has announced its newest member, Essentia. "The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving interoperability and adoption of comprehensive open solutions, today announced that Essentia has joined as its newest member and will provide a new platform for member collaboration. Essentia is a leader in providing next-generation platforms and services for online communities and commerce."

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Aptana Acquires Pydev, Leading Python IDE for Eclipse

Aptana Inc. has announced the acquisition of Pydev. "Privately held Aptana Inc., a leading provider of infrastructure for Web 2.0 application development and management, today announced the acquisition of Pydev, a highly popular Eclipse-based development environment for the Python software language. The combination of Pydev with Aptana Studio, which is approaching 2.3 million downloads, will bring Aptana's excellence in Ajax development ease to the Python community and bring Python support to Aptana's product lines."

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China's Linux market growth rate slowed in 2008Q2

CCID Consulting Co., Ltd. has announced a press release that looks at the Linux growth rate in China. "CCID Consulting's data shows that the size of China's Linux market in 2008Q2 reached 43.1 million Yuan, up 16.2% over 2007Q2. Compared with 2007Q2, the grow rate has slowed down, largely due to decline in centralized purchasing. Large industrial order is few; meanwhile, as the market becomes mature, industrial growth rate starts to slow down. The market transfers from concentration to dispersion, with competition heating up. Also seen is the transition from single server and desktop products to wider product lines and even competition of industrial chain alliance."

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OpenMRS and Pentaho collaborate on open-source health management

OpenMRS and Pentaho have announced a collaboration on the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS). "The integrated system demonstrates the power of the open source model to deliver real-world impact via community development to address user populations that are unable to acquire or maintain traditional proprietary medical records systems due to high software acquisition and maintenance costs, or the need for highly trained developers."

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Building Embedded Linux Systems, Second Edition--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has published the book Building Embedded Linux Systems, Second Edition by Karim Yaghmour, Jonathan Masters, Gilad Ben-Yossef, and Philippe Gerum.

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The IDA Pro Book--New from No Starch Press

No Starch Press has published the book The IDA Pro Book by Chris Eagle.

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Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf

Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby by Ian Dees.

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FSFE Newsletter

The August 23, 2008 edition of the FSFE Newsletter is online with the latest Free Software Foundation Europe news. Topics include:

1. Speeches about SELF, Free Software and licensing at FKFT
2. Local Fellowship meetings
3. New interns for FSFE
4. Students' union organizes talk on political aspects of Free Software
5. FTF releases training documentation on the SELF platform
6. Zurich Fellowship meeting - 2008-08-15
7. 'Who Owns Free Software? The Copyright and Patent Debate' speech at OSiM World, Berlin - 2008-08-17
8. Official launch of GPLv3 in The Netherlands - 2008-08-19

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Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom)

Royal Pingdom has published an analysis of global Linux usage. "The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular? To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave us a number of interesting and often surprising results. Aside from just looking at Linux itself, we have included eight common Linux distributions in this survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo."

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Nominations open for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize

Nominations are being accepted for the $10,000 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for software in the public interest. "Nominations for the 2008 Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest must be submitted to the Tides Foundation by September 1, 2008. The prize winner for the 2008 prize will be announced this fall."

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Contest: Best Advances for OpenVAS Network Vulnerability Tests

The Best Advances for OpenVAS Network Vulnerability Tests contest has been announced. "The OpenVAS Team (Open Vulnerability Assessment System) has started a contest and calls for submission of patches, scripts, converters or anything else that significantly improves the OpenVAS framework and extends Open Source Network Vulnerability Testing." The contest starts on August 23 and closes on October 15, prizes totaling 1000 Euros will be awarded to three winners.

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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 25 June 2008 (use Perl)

The minutes from the June 25, 2008 Perl 6 Design Meeting have been published. "The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 11 June 2008. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended. "

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Call For Papers - Hackers 2 Hackers Conference 5th Edition - Brazil

A call for papers has gone out for the Hackers 2 Hackers Conference. "H2HC is a hacker conference taking place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 8 to 9 November 2008." The submission deadline is October 5.

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IMF 2008 - Call for Participation

A call for participation has gone out for IMF 2008, the 4th International Conference on IT Incident Management & IT Forensics. The event takes place in Mannheim, Germany on September 23-25, 2008. The submission deadline is August 10.

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PacSec 2008 CFP

A call for papers has gone out for PacSec 2008. "Announcing the opportunity to submit papers for the PacSec 2008 network security training conference. The conference will be held November 12/13th in Tokyo at the Aoyama Diamond Hall above Omotesando station. The conference focuses on emerging information security tutorials - it is a bridge between the international and Japanese information security technology communities.." The submission deadline is September 1.

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Hack Week III is almost here!

Hack Week III begins Monday, August 25th and continues until Friday, August 29th. "What's Hack Week? Hack Week is a chance for Novell's developers to work on Innovation Time Off (ITO) projects, uninterrupted by normal hacking duties." There will also be a Hack Week room at the Utah Open Source Conference where others can join in.

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Events: September 4, 2008 to November 3, 2008

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
September 2 September 4	RailsConf Europe 2008	Berlin, Germany
September 5 September 7	FUDCon Brno 2008	Brno, Czech Republic
September 6 September 7	DjangoCon 2008	Mountain View, CA, USA
September 7 September 10	Workshop on Open Source Software for Computer and Network Forensics	Milan, Italy
September 7 September 14	Python Game Programming Challenge	Online
September 8	Encontro Nacional de openSUSE	Porto, Portugal
September 9 September 11	EFMI STC 2008	London, England
September 12 September 14	The UK Python Conference	Birmingham, England
September 15 September 18	ZendCon PHP 2008	Santa Clara, CA, USA
September 15 September 16	Linux Kernel Summit 2008	Portland, OR, USA
September 16 September 19	Web 2.0 Expo	New York, NY, USA
September 17 September 19	The Linux Plumbers Conference	Portland, OR, USA
September 18 September 19	Italian Perl Workshop	Pisa, Italy
September 19 September 20	Maemo Summit 2008	Berlin, Germany
September 20	Celebrating Software Freedom Day in Riga, Latvia	Riga, Latvia
September 22 September 25	Storage Developer Conference 2008	Santa Clara, CA, USA
September 23 September 25	4th International Conference on IT Incident Management and IT Forensics	Manheim, Germany
September 24 September 25	OpenExpo 2008 Zürich	Winterthur, Switzerland
September 25 September 27	Firebird Conference 2008	Bergamo, Italy
September 26 September 27	PGCon Brazil 2008	Sao Paulo, Brazil
September 26	Far East Perl Workshop 2008	Vladivostok, Russia
September 26 September 28	ToorCon Information Security Conference	San Diego, CA, USA
September 27 September 28	WineConf 2008	Bloomington, MN, USA
September 29 October 3	Netfilter Workshop 2008	Paris, France
September 29 September 30	Conference on Software Language Engineering	Toulouse, France
September 30 October 1	BA-Con 2008	Buenos Aires, Argentina
October 1 October 3	Vision 2008 Embedded Linux Developers Conference	San Francisco, USA
October 2 October 3	ekoparty Security Conference	Buenos Aires, Argentina
October 3 October 4	Open Source Days 2008	Copenhagen, Denmark
October 4	PyArkansas 2008	Central Arkansas, USA
October 4 October 5	Texas Regional Python Unconference 2008	Austin, TX, USA
October 7 October 10	OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference	New York, NY, USA
October 7	Openmind 2008	Tampere, Finland
October 7 October 10	Linux-Kongress 2008	Hamburg, Germany
October 7	Red Hat Government Users and Developers Conference	Washington, DC, United States
October 10 October 12	Ohio LinuxFest 2008	Columbus, Ohio, USA
October 10 October 12	PostgreSQL Conference West 08	Portland, OR, USA
October 10 October 12	Skolelinux Developer Gathering	Oslo, Norway
October 11 October 12	Pittsburgh Perl Workshop	Pittsburgh, PA, USA
October 11 October 12	MerbCamp	San Diego, CA, USA
October 13 October 14	Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit	New York, USA
October 13	Skolelinux User Conference	Oslo, Norway
October 15 October 16	OpenSAF Developer Days	Munich, Germany
October 17 October 18	European PGDay 2008	Prato, Italy
October 18 October 19	Maker Faire Austin	Austin, TX, USA
October 19 October 24	Colorado Software Summit 2008	Keystone, CO, USA
October 20 October 24	15th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference	Manassas, VA, USA
October 21 October 23	Web 2.0 Expo Europe	Berlin, Germany
October 21 October 24	Systems	Munich, Germany
October 22 October 24	Hack.lu 2008	Parc Hotel Alvisse, Luxembourg
October 22 October 24	Encuentro Linux	Concepción, Chile
October 24 October 26	Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit	Gothenburg, Sweden
October 25 October 26	T-DOSE 2008	Eindhoven, the Netherlands
October 25	Ontario Linux Fest 2008	Toronto, Canada
October 26 October 31	IBM Information On Demand 2008	Mandalay Bay - Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
October 27 October 30	Embedded Systems Conference - Boston	Boston, USA
October 29 November 1	10th Real-Time Linux Workshop	Colotlán, Jalisco, Mexico

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

Launchpad 2.1.8 announced

Version 2.1.8 of Launchpad, a collaborative hosting service for open source projects, has been announced. "This release brings two items of good news for anyone who commits code to branches registered in Launchpad: * Karma for commits: Launchpad now awards karma for code commits to project branches. * Feeds of each person's code commits: as well as a feed that shows which branches you work on, Launchpad now gives you a feed of all the commits you've made to branches in Launchpad."

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Fun patent of the day

It seems that Microsoft was awarded patent #7,415,666 on August 19, 2008. The bleeding-edge technology, which was evidently invented around 2005, is: "In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page."

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