Announcements

Google Summer of Code 2009 announcements

The following projects have announced their participation in the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

• Audacity
• Debian
• Inkscape
• KDE
• Perl
• PHP
• WorldForge
• wxWidgets
• Xiph.org (Ogg)
• XMMS2

See the official Google Summer of Code site for more information.

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Stallman: the JavaScript trap

Richard Stallman has posted a warning about non-free JavaScript code and a call for a mechanism which would enable browsers to run only freely-licensed JavaScript. "It is possible to release a Javascript program as free software, by distributing the source code under a free software license. But even if the program's source is available, there is no easy way to run your modified version instead of the original. Current free browsers do not offer a facility to run your own modified version instead of the one delivered in the page. The effect is comparable to tivoization, although not quite so hard to overcome."

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Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces New Version of Sugar Learning Platform

Sugar Labs has announced the availability of version 0.84 of the Sugar Learning Platform for the One Laptop Per Child XO-1, classroom PCs, and netbook computers. "Designed from the ground up for children, the Sugar computer environment is used by almost one-million students aged 5 to 12 in over 40 countries every school day. This improved version features new collaborative Sugar Activities and, in response to teacher feedback, the ability to easily suspend and resume Activities, saving time in the classroom."

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Mandriva announces Q4 financial results

Mandriva has announced its latest financial results. " Turnover is 0.83 million Euros, operating revenue is 1.11 million Euros while costs are down to 1.51 million Euros representing a trading loss of 0.40 million Euros. Turnover remains at the same level as for the previous quarter. Net loss comes to 0.14 million Euros. The company has redeployed its strategy around the OS (OEM, ODM ...) applications yielding strong added value (Pulse 2; ...) and the web. The financial restructuring carried out at the end of 2008, along with the sales reorganisation currently underway, should begin to show tangible results in the 2009 financial year."

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TomTom joins the Open Invention Network

The Open Invention Network has announced that TomTom has signed up. There's no mention of the Microsoft litigation, but clearly that has to be a motivating factor; it suggests that OIN may get involved in that case. "'Linux plays an important role at TomTom as the core of all our Portable Navigation Devices,' said Peter Spours, director of IP at TomTom. 'We believe that by becoming an Open Invention Network licensee, we encourage Linux development and foster innovation in a technical community that benefits everyone.'"

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Wietse Venema and Creative Commons win FSF awards

The Free Software Foundation has announced the recipients of its annual free software awards. "Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman."

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Amendments to the OpenOffice.org Community Council Charter

The OpenOffice.org Community Council Charter has been amended. "The main changes are an increase in the number of members from nine to ten and the corresponding voting constituencies. With the new charter, any OpenOffice.org community member may stand for a council seat. We are looking forward to the upcoming elections to increase the vitality of our community and the Community Council."

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EuroSciPy 2009 call for papers

EuroSciPy 2009 has been announced, along with a call for papers. "We're pleased to announce the EuroSciPy 2009 Conference to be held in Leipzig, Germany on July 25-26, 2009. This is the second conference after the successful conference last year. Again, EuroSciPy will be a venue for the European community of users of the Python programming language in science." Submissions are due by June 15.

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Call for presentations - Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

A call for presentations has gone out for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009. "Libre Graphics Meeting, the premiere workshop and conference for developers and enthusiasts of free software graphics, will be held May 6-9, 2009, at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. LGM invites you to share your work with the community. Topics of interest include reports on major open source graphics projects, technology previews, engineering talks, power-user techniques, graphics business best practices, and general issues such as open file formats and collaboration." Submissions are due by April 1.

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UKUUG - Summer 2009 - Call For Papers

A call for papers has gone out for the UKUUG summer 2009 conference. Submissions are due by May 8. "Summer 2009 will take place at the Birmingham Conservatoire from Friday 7th to Sunday 9th August. The conference this year will have a choice of conference streams, and we are particularly keen to get other groups and projects involved."

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FSFE announces the second European Licensing and Legal Workshop for Free Software

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has announced a workshop on the licensing and legal aspects of free software to be held April 23-24 in Amsterdam. It is primarily targeted at members of the European Legal Network, which was created to address free software legal issues throughout all of the different jurisdictions in Europe. "This event is one of the activities of FSFE's Freedom Task Force (FTF). The FTF is an infrastructure activity to help individuals, projects and businesses understand Free Software licensing and the opportunities that it presents. The FTF works in partnership with gpl-violations.org to deal with licence violations in the European arena. The goal of the FTF is to foster best practice throughout the industry." Click below for the full announcement.

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White Oak Technologies, Inc., Google, Sun Microsystems Sponsor PyCon

White Oak Technologies, Inc., Google, Sun Microsystems have been announced as sponsors of the PyCon 2009 conference. "White Oak Technologies, Inc., Google, Sun Microsystems Sponsor World's Largest Python Conference Python 3.0 enters spotlight at PyCon 2009 CHICAGO - March 24, 2009 - PyCon 2009, the largest annual conference of the worldwide Python programming community, takes place March 25 - April 2 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare and the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare in Chicago, IL. The core conference runs March 27-29, with days of special events both before and after the main conference."

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Events: April 2, 2009 to June 1, 2009

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
March 23 April 3	Google Summer of Code '09 Student Application Period	online, USA
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
April 27	OSDM 2009	Bangkok, Thailand
May 4 May 8	JavaScript/Ajax Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
May 4 May 7	RailsConf 2009	Las Vegas, NV, USA
May 4 May 6	EuroDjangoCon 2009	Prague, Czech Republic
May 4 May 6	SYSTOR 2009---The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference	Haifa, Israel
May 5	Linuxwochen Austria - Salzburg	Salzburg, Austria
May 6 May 9	Libre Graphics Meeting 2009	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
May 6 May 8	Embedded Linux training	Maynard, USA
May 7	NLUUG spring conference	Ede, The Netherlands
May 8 May 10	PyCon Italy 2009	Florence, Italy
May 8 May 9	Linuxwochen Austria - Eisenstadt	Eisenstadt, Austria
May 8 May 9	Erlanger Firebird Conference 2009	Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
May 11	The Free! Summit	San Mateo, CA, USA
May 13 May 15	FOSSLC Summercamp 2009	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
May 15 May 16	CONFidence 2009	Krakow, Poland
May 15	Firebird Developers Day - Brazil	Piracicaba, Brazil
May 16 May 17	YAPC::Russia 2009	Moscow, Russia
May 18 May 19	Cloud Summit 2009	Las Vegas, NV, USA
May 19 May 22	PGCon PostgreSQL Conference	Ottawa, Canada
May 19	Workshop on Software Engineering for Secure Systems	Vancouver, Canada
May 19 May 22	php|tek 2009	Chicago, IL, USA
May 19 May 21	Where 2.0 Conference	San Jose, CA, USA
May 19 May 22	SEaCURE.it	Villasimius, Italy
May 21	7th WhyFLOSS Conference Madrid 09	Madrid, Spain
May 22 May 23	eLiberatica - The Benefits of Open Source and Free Technologies	Bucharest, Romania
May 23 May 24	LayerOne Security Conference	Anaheim, CA, USA
May 25 May 29	Ubuntu Developers Summit - Karmic Koala	Barcelona, Spain
May 27 May 28	EUSecWest 2009	London, UK
May 28	Canberra LUG Monthly meeting - May 2009	Canberra, Australia
May 29 May 31	Mozilla Maemo Mer Danish Weekend	Copenhagen, Denmark
May 31 June 3	Techno Security 2009	Myrtle Beach, SC, USA

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

O'Reilly's ETech conference scopes out ideas at the edge of innovation

O'Reilly has published a report on the recent ETech 2009 conference. "ETech 2009, O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference held March 9-12 in San Jose, urged web technologists and visionaries to grasp the opportunities in today's financial and political turmoil by focusing on work they care deeply about. Through four jam-packed days, conference-goers immersed themselves in revolutionary ideas and emergent technologies they can exploit to succeed."

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KDE Brainstorm: Get Your Ideas Into KDE! (KDEDot)

KDE.News has announced the new brainstorm forum. "KDE is about the community, rather than the product. It is not all about the code: there are many other ways in which people can be part of KDE, and a very simple way is to connect with other people. In an effort to bridge the gap between users and developers, the KDE Community Forums have launched a new initiative to coordinate feature requests. A new "Brainstorm" section has been created in the KDE Community Forums: users are encouraged to post requests there."

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Creative Commons weighs in on proposed OpenStreetMap license

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has been looking into changing the license that covers its data for some time now. A new license—the Open Database License or ODbL—was proposed in February to replace the current Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. LWN had a detailed look at the licensing issues in October 2008, but the controversy goes back at least a year before that.

Creative Commons recently made some comments on ODbL that are rather critical of the license, at least for use by OSM; it would rather see OSM data reside in the public domain—as would a number of OSM contributors. "In general, we believe that the interests of both providers and users of data and databases, particularly in science, education, and other areas where the ability to exchange and re-use data freely is critical to achieving the objectives of the data exchange community, are best served by reducing unnecessary transaction costs, simplifying legal tools, and providing as much clarity and certainty to providers and users of their respective rights and obligations as the law allows." This seems likely to muddy the waters further, which may delay or change any OSM relicensing plans.

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