Announcements

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle ebook deletion

The Free Software Foundation has issued a press release covering an apology from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and calls upon Amazon to free the ebook reader. "In a post to the Kindle Community forum on Amazon's Web site, Bezos said: "This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.""

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JPUG announces 10th anniversary

The Japan PostgreSQL Users Group has announced its 10th anniversary. "Japan PostgreSQL Users Group (JPUG) gave its first cry at the plenary meeting at Makuhari city, ten years before of this date of 23rd July. We are very glad to score a decade length activitywith quite a lot of successful stories. On this memorable date, JPUG wished to deliver everyone who is engaged with PostgreSQL two statements by Mr Tatsuo Ishii, the founding chairman, and Mr Hiroo Kataoka, the current chairman..."

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Rock-The-Vote goes open source

Rock-The-Vote has announced a partnership with the OSDV Foundation's TrustTheVote project. "Rock the Vote and Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation's TrustTheVote Project are partnering to introduce new online voter registration tools based on open source technology. The TrustTheVote Project will provide its open source technology platform to enable Rock the Vote to streamline and improve the user-facing registration process and help State elections offices process registration forms."

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Linux Foundation launches affinity credit card

The Linux Foundation has announced it will offer an affinity Visa Platinum credit card for people who want to contribute to advancing the Linux operating system through Linux Foundation initiatives. "The Linux Foundation is partnering with CardPartner, Inc. to offer the affinity Linux credit card through UMB Bank. The Linux Foundation will receive $50 for every activated card as well as a percentage of every purchase made with the credit card. All funds from the Visa card program will go directly towards providing community technical events and travel grants for open source community members in order to accelerate Linux innovation."

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NYSE-listed Red Hat Inc. Becomes Newest Component of S&P 500

NYSE Euronext has announced that Red Hat, Inc. has become the newest component of the S&P 500. ""Red Hat's inclusion in the S&P 500 is a significant milestone for the company, and on behalf of NYSE Euronext we want to congratulate Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst and his team for this accomplishment," said Scott R. Cutler, EVP and Head of Listings, Americas, NYSE Euronext." (Thanks to Scott Bronson)

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Beautiful Data--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has published the book Beautiful Data by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher.

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Pro Git book released

Author Scott Chacon has announced that his upcoming book, Pro Git, has been posted under a (noncommercial) Creative Commons license. Interested readers can go to the online version to read the book now, or purchase it in August.

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Programming Interactivity--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has published the book Programming Interactivity by Joshua Noble.

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Documenting barriers to entry into free software projects

Dave Neary has announced a draft version of a document on community barriers to entry [PDF]; the idea is to help projects identify and fix problems which keep their communities from growing. "In many corporate projects, the most damaging dynamic is when a decision gets made by someone not on the developer mailing list, and is thus completely unaccountable to the community for the decision. It is damaging for your community, who feels ignored. In the case where these decisions are unpopular, it is damaging for the morale of your developers, who must defend strategic changes in the product they may not agree with."

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SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

The 2009 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards been announced. The H summarizes the results: "This years winner for the Best Project for Government was OpenOffice.org for its popular fully-featured office suite and Firebird, a relational database management system (RDBMS), won the prize for Best Project for the Enterprise. The Notepad++ source code editor won the Best Tool or Utility for Developers and phpMyAdmin, a MySQL administration tool, was chosen as the Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins. "

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Announcing the 2009 White Camel Awards (use Perl)

The 2009 White Camel Awards have been announced. "The White Camel Awards recognize the many significant contributions made by the unsung heros of the Perl community. The efforts of these volunteers collectively make the Perl language and the Perl community better for all of us."

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What are you doing to help the cause? (Linux Journal)

Linux Journal is conducting a short survey on open-source participation. "The "beer" may be free but it takes more than beer to make a party work. Choose the item that best describes what you're doing to help the open source party, if you do more than one of the items, choose the one that you feel provides the most value."

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Linux-Kongress moves, LCA extends deadline

A couple of noteworthy bits of conference-related information:

• Linux-Kongress has resolved its scheduling conflict with the Linux Plumbers Conference by shifting its dates to October 27 to 30. The conference has also moved to Dresden. The CFP is open through the end of August.

• Linux.conf.au has extended its submission deadline to July 31. "The success of the papers so far has put us in a very generous mood. So we've decided to give all you slackers out there an extension on the Call for Papers by one week!"

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Libre Graphics Meeting announces dates and venue

The 2010 Libre Graphics Meeting has been announced. "Users and developers of Free, Libre and Open Source graphics software will meet in Brussels, Belgium on May 26-29, 2010 at the fifth annual Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM). Held in a historical piano factory, newly renovated into a lively exhibition and work space near Brussels' city center, LGM 2010 offers software developers, artists, designers and other graphics professionals the chance to collaborate and learn from each other. LGM emphasizes the sharing of collective creativity, innovation and ideas and is free for everyone to attend."

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LinuxCon discount registration deadline in three weeks

The deadline for LinuxCon discount registration is August 15th. "LinuxCon - The New Technical Conference for All Matters Linux September 21-23, 2009 Portland Marriott Waterfront - Portland, OR. Only three more weeks to register to attend LinuxCon for the reduced fee of $399."

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Events: August 6, 2009 to October 5, 2009

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
August 7 August 9	UKUUG Summer 2009 Conference	Birmingham, UK
August 7	August Penguin 2009	Weizmann Institute, Israel
August 10 August 14	USENIX Security Symposium	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
August 11 August 13	Flash Memory Summit	Santa Clara, CA, USA
August 11	FOSS Dev Camp - Open Source World	San Francisco, CA, USA
August 12 August 13	OpenSource World Conference and Expo	San Francisco, CA, USA
August 12 August 13	Military Open Source Software	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
August 13 August 16	Hacking At Random 2009	Vierhouten, The Netherlands
August 18 August 23	2009 Python in Science Conference	Pasadena, CA, USA
August 22 August 23	Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon)	St. Augustin, Germany
August 22 August 23	OpenSQL Camp	St. Augustin, Germany
August 31 September 4	Ubuntu Developer Week	Internet, Internet
September 1 September 4	JBoss World Chicago	Chicago, IL, USA
September 1 September 4	Red Hat Summit Chicago	Chicago, IL, USA
September 1 September 5	DrupalCon	Paris, France
September 4 September 5	PyCon 2009 Argentina	Buenos Aires, Argentina
September 7 September 11	XtreemOS summer school	Oxford, UK
September 7 September 8	FRHACK.ORG IT Security Conference	Besançon, France
September 8 September 12	DjangoCon '09	Portland, OR, USA
September 10 September 11	Fedora Developer Conference 2009	Brno, Czech Republic
September 12	Evil Robot Conference (Free Conference, Free Software)	Raleigh, NC, USA
September 14 September 18	Django Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
September 15 September 17	International Conference on IT Security Incident Management and IT Forensics	Stuttgart, Germany
September 17 September 18	Internet Security Operations and Intelligence 7	San Diego, CA, USA
September 17 September 20	openSUSE Conference	Nuremberg, Germany
September 18 September 19	BruCON	Brussels, Belgium
September 18 September 20	EuroBSDCon 2009	Cambridge, UK
September 19	Atlanta Linux Fest 2009	Atlanta, Georgia, USA
September 19	Beijing Perl Workshop	Beijing, China
September 19	Software Freedom Day	Worldwide
September 20	SELinux Developer Summit 2009 @ LinuxCon	Portland, Oregon, USA
September 21 September 23	LinuxCon 2009	Portland, OR, USA
September 21 September 25	Ruby on Rails Bootcamp with Charles B. Quinn	Atlanta, USA
September 23 September 25	Linux Plumbers Conference	Portland, Oregon, USA
September 23 September 25	Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection	Saint-Malo, Brittany, France
September 23 September 25	OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2009	Hamburg, Germany
September 23	Bacula Conference 2009	Cologne, Germany
September 24 September 26	Joomla! and Virtue Mart Day Germany	Bad Nauheim, Germany
September 25 September 27	International Conference on Open Source	Taipei, Taiwan
September 25 September 27	Ohio LinuxFest	Columbus, Ohio, USA
September 26 September 27	PyCon India 2009	Bengaluru, India
September 26	Open Source Conference 2009 Okinawa	Ginowan City, Okinawa, Japan
September 26 September 27	Mini-DebConf at ICOS	Taipei, Taiwan
September 28 September 30	Real time Linux workshop	Dresden, Germany
September 28 September 30	X Developers' Conference 2009	Portland, OR, USA
September 28 October 2	Sixteenth Annual Tcl/Tk Conference (2009)	Portland, OR 97232, USA
September 30	HCC!Linux Theme Day	Houten, Netherlands
October 1 October 2	Open World Forum	Paris, France
October 2 October 4	7th International Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics	Mountain View, CA, USA
October 2	LLVM Developers' Meeting	Cupertino, CA, USA
October 2 October 4	Linux Autumn (Jesien Linuksowa) 2009	Huta Szklana, Poland
October 2 October 4	Ubuntu Global Jam	Online, Online
October 2 October 3	Open Source Developers Conference France	Paris, France
October 2	Mozilla Public DevDay/Open Web Camp 2009	Prague, Czech Republic
October 3 October 4	T-DOSE 2009	Eindhoven, The Netherlands
October 3 October 4	EU MozCamp 2009	Prague, Czech Republic

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

EuroSciPy 2009 - first slides

Slides and abstracts from EuroSciPy have been posted. "The first slides for the talks at EuroSciPy are available: http://www.euroscipy.org/presentations/slides/index.html The abstracts of all talks can be found here: http://www.euroscipy.org/presentations/abstracts/index.html."

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GCDS Slides and Videos Online (KDEDot)

KDE.News has announced the availability of slides from the recent Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. "The available slides and videos from GCDS are now available for download. Grab the slides to catch up on over 40 of the best talks, and get the videos to over 50 enlightening presentation. Thanks to GeekSoc for hosting and thanks to the team from KDE who manned the cameras."

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Kirrily Robert’s OSCON keynote on encouraging women in open source has received a number of great reviews. For those who missed it, Kirrily has posted the text and slides from the talk. "The FLOSSPOLS survey asked open source contributors whether they had witnessed sexism, harrassment, or discrimination in our community. Here’s what they found: 80% of women had noticed sexism in the open source community. 80% of men never noticed anything. That’s a pretty big gap."

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