Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
The FAI Project celebrates its 10th anniversary
The FAI Project has announced its 10th anniversary. "Ten years ago, on December 21st, 1999, Thomas Lange announced the release of version 1.0 of FAI (Fully Automatic Installation). The tool was developed at the University of Cologne, because the author was too lazy to install Debian on 16 hosts manually. FAI now also supports the installation of Ubuntu and RPM-based Linux distributions."
Commercial announcements
Shuttleworth stepping down as Canonical CEO
Mark Shuttleworth has announced that, as of March, he'll relinquish the job of Canonical CEO to Jane Silber. "Ive become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I cant think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldnt think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane."
MontaVista Partners With CriticalBlue
MontaVista has announced a partnership with CriticalBlue. "MontaVista(r) Software LLC, a leader in embedded Linux(r) commercialization, and CriticalBlue, a pioneer in embedded multicore software analysis, exploration and verification tools, announced today CriticalBlue has joined the MontaVista partner program and will make their Prism product available on MontaVista Linux 6 and Montavista Linux Carrier Grade Edition products."
Legal Announcements
The text of the new Moonlight covenant
For the curious, Microsoft has posted the new "covenant not to sue" covering Moonlight 3 and 4. It is still quite narrow. "Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue End Users for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft and its Subsidiaries on account of such End Users' use of Moonlight Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term and, if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period, but only to the extent such Moonlight Implementations are used as Conforming Runtimes." Microsoft can also discontinue it at any time.
New Books
Security on Rails--New from Pragmatic Press
Pragmatic Press has published the book Security on Rails by Ben Poweski and David Raphael.Web Design for Developers--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book Web Design for Developers by Brian Hogan.
Resources
10 x 10: LPI and IBM developerWorks
IBM developerWorks and LPI are celebrating both of their 10 year anniversaries. "2009 marked the 10th Anniversary of LPI. In addition, IBM developerWorks celebrated their own 10th Anniversary. The developerWorks crew marked their anniversary by creating a webpage called: "10 important Linux developments everyone should know about: Celebrating 10 years of Linux accomplishments".
The GPL Compliance Engineering Guide
Armijn Hemel has released version 3.0 of the The GPL Compliance Engineering Guide (PDF). "Compliance engineering and checking for licensing issues tends to endanger profit. First of all, it delays the release. Proper compliance engineering could take a few days (depending on the device), any questions regarding sources have to go back to the factory, sources have to be shipped, and so on. Often the factory won't or can't release all sources (because they bought it too) and it could take many months before the device is compliant. Arriving a few months later than the competition will mean you lost the race. Companies often also don't get more than one or two test samples, which they cannot afford to lend out to a compliance engineer when they need to test functionality."
Meeks: Some thoughts on copyright assignment
Michael Meeks's posting on copyright assignment is not a quick read, but it's worth the effort; this is a more thorough look at the issue than your editor has seen elsewhere. "I am not aware of a single project that mandates copyright assignment to a corporation that has a diverse, and thriving developer community. If there was even one, the business model of 'communitising' a code-base, then firing all your developers, sitting back, and collecting an effort-free rent might become attractive. In contrast I am aware of many diverse and thriving communities that have eclectic ownership, and also some less thriving ones that are dominated by single entities."
Blog Postings
"The meaning of open" according to Google
Here is a lengthy weblog posting by Google VP Jonathan Rosenberg on what "open" means to that company. It was, evidently, initially meant for employees, then made available to the wider world. "So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don't just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement."
Updegrove: A Concise Introduction to Free and Open Source Software
Andy Updegrove introduces free and open source software in a post on his blog. The blog version is the introduction of a longer article that seeks to give an overall summary of what FOSS is and how it came about for audiences that may have heard of it, but are not really up on what it is. "That movement questions the utility and fairness of many traditional copyright and patent-based legal restrictions, and seeks to liberate information for the benefit of all. In the case of FLOSS, it also articulates a set of ethical rules intended not only to foster free access, but also to inspire — and in some cases require — those that benefit from such access to contribute their own modifications and additions to FLOSS back to the common weal as well."
Surveys
FUDCon Toronto: please take the 5-minute feedback survey
A FUDCon survey is taking place. "FUDCon Toronto is over - our largest FUDCon yet! We'd love to get your thoughts on how it went, so: * If you attended FUDCon Toronto, either in-person or remotely via Fedora Live, please take this survey and tell us what you thought. * If you didn't attend FUDCon Toronto but wanted to, please take this survey and tell us how we can help you get to the next one. * If you didn't want to go to FUDCon Toronto, please take this survey and tell us why - it's anonymous. ;-)"
Calls for Presentations
OSCON Puts Open Source to Work
A call for participation has gone out for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention puts the freedom of open source to work July 19-23, 2010, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. Program chairs Edd Dumbill and Allison Randal have opened the call for participation, requesting proposals for sessions and tutorials." Proposals are due by February 1.
Texas Linux Fest announces keynote speaker and call for papers
Texas Linux Fest (TLF) has announced that openSUSE community manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier will keynote the first annual Linux and open source conference for Texas and the surrounding region. TLF will be held April 10, 2010 at the Monarch Event Center in Austin, Texas. The call for papers is also open, with a submission deadline of February 15, 2010. "In that spirit, Texas Linux Fest is an entirely community-driven event, catering equally to the business and home Linux user, and to experienced developers and newcomers alike. We invite you to share your work with the rest of the community by submitting a talk for this year's event." Click below for the full announcement.
Upcoming Events
10 candles for Brussels Free and Open Source Developer Meeting
FOSDEM will celebrate its 10th anniversary. "On February 6 and 7, over five thousand Free and Open Source developers gather at the University Libre de Bruxelles, campus Solbosch, for the tenth annual FOSDEM conference. Keynote speakers this year include Brooks Davis (FreeBSD committer), Richard Clayton (Cambridge university security expert) and Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux kernel maintainer)."
O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo 2010 announced
The MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 has been announced. "The MySQL ecosystem continues to thrive, with an engaged community working together on the open source database. O'Reilly Media invites this community to a new event, the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, April 12-15, at the Santa Clara Convention Center and the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara."
Events: December 31, 2009 to March 1, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| January 13 January 15 |
Foundations of Open Media Software | Wellington, New Zealand |
| January 15 January 22 |
Camp KDE 2010 | San Diego, CA, USA |
| January 18 January 23 |
linux.conf.au | Wellington, New Zealand |
| January 23 | Workshop on GCC Research Opportunities | Pisa, Italy |
| January 23 January 24 |
DrupalSouth Wellington 2010 | Wellington, New Zealand |
| February 2 | Prague PostgreSQL Developers' Day 2010 | Prague, Czech Republic |
| February 5 February 7 |
Frozen Perl 2010 | Minneapolis, MN, USA |
| February 6 | Super Happy Dev Castle #0 | Belfast, N. Ireland, United Kingdom |
| February 6 February 7 |
Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting | Brussels, Belgium |
| February 10 | Red Hat Cloud Computing Forum | Online, Online |
| February 11 February 13 |
Bay Area Haskell Hackathon | Mountain View, USA |
| February 15 February 18 |
ARES 2010 Conference | Krakow, Poland |
| February 17 February 25 |
PyCon 2010 | Atlanta, GA, USA |
| February 19 February 21 |
SCALE 8x - 2010 Southern California Linux Expo | Los Angeles, USA |
| February 19 February 20 |
GNUnify | Pune, India |
| February 20 February 21 |
FOSSTER '10 | Amritapuri, India |
| February 22 February 24 |
O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing | New York, NY, USA |
| February 27 February 28 |
The Debian/GNOME bug weekend | Online, Internet |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Web sites
New LLVM Blog announced
A new LLVM Blog has been announced. "A few of us got together and started an official LLVM (and its sub-projects) blog: http://blog.llvm.org/ I think that a blog is a potentially great way to cover some areas of LLVM that we're lacking in the community".
Page editor: Forrest Cook