Announcements

Apple: why iPhone jailbreaking should not be allowed

Here, by way of this EFF advisory, is Apple's plea to the Library of Congress [PDF] against a DMCA exemption which would allow jailbreaking on locked phones. "The acts of circumvention that the exemption would permit would result in infringing uses of copyrighted firmware stored on smart phones and of copyrighted content that runs on those phones, thereby failing the fundamental prerequisite requirement of Section 1201(a)(1)(B) for an exemption. Although that fact alone should preempt any need for further consideration, the proposed exemption should also be rejected because of a host of bad consequences that will flow from it. In the case of the iPhone, it will destroy the 'chain of trust' that Apple has carefully engineered into the product to protect users from serious functional problems that often result from unauthorized modifications to the device's OS."

Comments (44 posted)

Call for Prior Art

Red Hat and Novell have been accused of patent infringement. "IP Innovation L.L.C. and Technology Licensing Corporation (collectively, "Plaintiffs") have brought a patent-infringement action against Red Hat, Inc., and Novell, Inc., alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Numbers 5,072,412; 5,533,183; and 5,394,521. The patents concern a user interface that has multiple workspaces. The Plaintiffs' complaint identifies as accused products "Red Hat Linux system," the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop," and the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server."" This site has link where you can submit prior art to combat this claim.

Comments (9 posted)

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Here's a weblog entry by Simon Phipps describing the difficulties involved in changing the licensing of really old software - and the Sun RPC code in particular. This code has been the subject of some worry for years now, since its license is not truly free. At the end of Simon's posting, he announces: "On Saturday I was able to tell Europe's Free Software developers that the licenses on the RPC code are no longer a barrier to Free software - we'll change the license to Sun's copyrights in the RPC code to a standard 3-clause BSD license, allowing inheritance of that licensing by both Debian and Fedora. I'm delighted to have been able to fix this problem, which arose not because of failure but because of the success of software freedom over many years and because of Sun's early commitment to it."

Comments (8 posted)

Red Hat Moves to Expand Server Virtualization Interoperability

Red Hat has announced a virtualization interoperability agreement with Microsoft. "Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that, in response to strong customer demand, it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft Corporation to enable increased interoperability for the companies' virtualization platforms. Each company will join the other's virtualization validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers. The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualized Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence."

Comments (none posted)

The 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners

The 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners have been announced. "The polls are closed and the results are in. We had a record number of votes cast for the eighth straight year. Congratulations should go to each and every nominee. We once again had some extremely close races and a couple multi-year winners were unseated."

Comments (none posted)

ACM CCS '09: Call for workshop proposals

A call for proposals has gone out for the 2009 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. The event takes place in Chicago, IL on November 9-13, 2009. Submissions are due by February 28. "Proposals are solicited for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACM CCS 2009. Each workshop provides a forum to address a specific topic at the forefront of security research. A workshop must be a full day in length."

Full Story (comments: none)

2009 Linux Plumbers Conference Call For Topics

The 2009 Linux Plumbers Conference is currently in an early stage of its organization process. To carry things forward, the LPC organizers are currently soliciting ideas for overall topics to be discussed at this year's event. They have asked, in particular, for input from LWN readers, who are invited to post their ideas as comments to this article. If you have some thoughts on what would make a good discussion topic, please take a moment to post them here.

Full Story (comments: 32)

PyCon blog badges are avalable

Blog badges for promoting the upcoming PyCon are available. "If you blog, please let your readers know about PyCon. A blog badge is a nice way to enhance such a post."

Full Story (comments: none)

Events: February 26, 2009 to April 27, 2009

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
February 24 February 26	VMworld Europe 2009	Cannes, France
February 25 February 27	German Perl Workshop	Frankfurt Main, Germany
February 27	PHP UK Conference	London, UK
February 28	Belgian Perl Workshop	Leuven, Belgium
February 28	uCon Security Conference	Recife, Brazil
March 1 March 4	Global Ignite week	Online
March 3 March 8	CeBIT 2009	Hanover, Germany
March 4 March 7	DrupalCon DC 2009	Washington D.C., USA
March 6	Dutch Perl Workshop	Arnhem, The Netherlands
March 7	Ukrainian Perl Workshop 2009	Kiev, Ukraine
March 8 March 11	Bossa Conference 2009	Recife, Brazil
March 9 March 13	Advanced Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn	Atlanta, GA, USA
March 9 March 12	O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference	San Jose, CA, USA
March 12 March 15	Pingwinaria 2009 - Polish Linux User Group Conference	Spala, Poland
March 14	OpenNMS User Conference (Europe) 2009	Frankfurt Main, Germany
March 14 March 15	Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2009	Chemnitz, Germany
March 16 March 20	Android Bootcamp with Mark Murphy	Atlanta, USA
March 16 March 20	CanSecWest Vancouver 2009	Vancouver, BC, Canada
March 18	Linuxwochen Österreich - Klagenfurt	Klagenfurt, Austria
March 21 March 22	Libre Planet 2009	Cambridge, MA, USA
March 23 March 27	iPhone Bootcamp	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
March 23 April 3	Google Summer of Code '09 Student Application Period	online, USA
March 23 March 27	ApacheCon Europe 2009	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
March 24 March 26	UKUUG Spring 2009 Conference	London, England
March 25 March 29	PyCon 2009	Chicago, IL, USA
March 27 March 29	Free Software and Beyond The World of Peer Production	Manchester, UK
March 28	Open Knowledge Conference 2009	London, UK
March 31 April 2	Solutions Linux France	Paris, France
March 31 April 3	Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 3 April 5	PostgreSQL Conference: East 09	Philadelphia, PA, USA
April 3 April 4	Flourish Conference	Chicago, IL, USA
April 6 April 8	CELF Embedded Linux Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 6 April 7	Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 8 April 10	Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 14	OpenClinica European Summit	Brussels, Belgium
April 15	Linuxwochen Österreich - Krems	Krems, Austria
April 16 April 17	Nordic Perl Workshop 2009	Oslo, Norway
April 16 April 19	Linux Audio Conference 2009	Parma, Italy
April 16 April 18	Linuxwochen Austria - Wien	Wien, Austria
April 20 April 24	samba eXPerience 2009	Göttingen, Germany
April 20 April 23	MySQL Conference and Expo	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 20 April 24	Perl Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, GA, USA
April 20 April 24	Cloud Slam '09	Online, Online
April 22 April 25	ACCU 2009	Oxford, United Kingdom
April 23 April 26	Liwoli 2009	Linz, Austria
April 23	Linuxwochen Austria - Linz	Linz, Austria
April 23 April 24	European Licensing and Legal Workshop for Free Software	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
April 25 May 1	Ruby & Ruby on Rails Bootcamp	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
April 25 April 26	LinuxFest Northwest 2009 10th Anniversary	Bellingham, Washington, USA
April 25	Linuxwochen Austria - Graz	Graz, Austria
April 25	Festival Latinoamericano instalación de Software libre	All Latin America, All Latin America
April 25	Grazer Linux Tage 2009	Graz, Austria

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

Business of Open Source videos from LCA available

FOSSBazaar is hosting videos of the Business of Open Source mini-conference at Linux.conf.au (LCA). "The goal of this mini-conf was to share and learn about non-coding business aspects of making an open source project successful. Speakers include Jacinta Richardson (Running an open source training business), Bdale Garbee (Collaborating Successfully with Large Corporations), Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier (Marketing open source projects) and others."

Full Story (comments: none)

FOSDEM videos released

Videos from the Debian devroom at FOSDEM are available (click below for more information). LinuxMagazine also has videos of the Micro Distro Summit. "Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack."

Full Story (comments: 3)