Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Defective by Design delivers iPad anti-DRM petition to Steve Jobs
The Free Software Foundation has sent a petition to Steve Jobs regarding the iPad. "The Free Software Foundation's (FSF) Defective by Design campaign against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) delivered its "iPad is iBad for Freedom" petition to Apple CEO Steve Jobs today, demanding that he drop DRM on all Apple devices. The petition was launched at <http://defectivebydesign.org/ipad> to coincide with the iPad debut event in San Francisco. Within 24 hours, over 5,000 people had signed the petition."
Commercial announcements
Matt Asay becomes Canonical's COO
Canonical has announced that its new chief operating officer will be Matt Asay. "'As more companies and people are embracing Ubuntu for their day-to-day computing, we felt it critical to bring in a person who knew not just open source, but has a long experience in making Linux relevant to businesses and users alike,' said Jane Silber, current COO and upcoming CEO, Canonical. 'We think Matt brings to Canonical the perfect blend of industry, executive and community savvy'"
Ksplice Uptrack is available
Ksplice Uptrack (commercial software) is available with a 30 day free trial. "Wanted to make sure you were aware of the Ksplice Uptrack general availability today -- eliminating the need to reboot Linux servers once a month to apply security updates. The service is based on new technology out of MIT that lets the Linux kernel be updated live, without restarting or disrupting running applications. On the coolness scale, this is like changing out a car's engine while speeding down the highway."
Legal Announcements
EFF fights for cell phone users' privacy
The EFF has issued a media release concerning cell phone privacy. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will be arguing this Thursday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia, urging the court to block a government attempt to seize telephone company records detailing a cell phone user's past locations without first getting a search warrant."
UK.gov tweaks open source policy small print (The Register)
The Register reports on changes to the UK government's open source policy. "The UK government has rejigged its open source and open standards software procurement policy, following pressure from OSS vendors last autumn. Early last year the Cabinet Office revised its rules on public sector open source software purchases, but many OSS players complained that the policy amendments didnt go far enough. Others grumbled that the government was failing to police its own rules." (Thanks to Paul Sladen).
New Books
Language Implementation Patterns--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book Language Implementation Patterns by Terence Parr.Metaprogramming Ruby--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has published the book Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta.
Resources
FSFE Newsletter
The January, 2010 edition of the FSFE Newsletter is online with the latest Free Software Foundation Europe news. Topics include: "1. Fellowship elections, introducing the candidates: Julia Klein and Björn Schießle 2. Ongoing website restructuring 3. Standards and patents at WIPO, Geneva, Switzerland, 25-29 Jan 4. Fellowship Jabber meeting: "What does it mean to be a candidate for the GA seat?", 06 Jan 5. December Fellowship grants.."
Contests and Awards
Lantronix launches global Linux design contest
Lantronix has announced a global design contest for its XPort Pro. "XPort Pro the world's smallest 's smallest Linux computer and provides a powerful engine for deploying advanced applications at the network edge. The leading-edge architecture, 32-bit processing power and ample memory allows resource-intensive applications to be deployed on a single platform. Lantronix will award prizes of $6,000 and $3,000 to the two top entries for Best Linux Design, and a separate prize of $3,000 for the Best Student Linux Design. Entries must be submitted by August 6, 2010, and the winners will be announced at ESC Boston."
2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice award winners announced
The winners of the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice awards have been announced. "The polls are closed and the results for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards are in. Ubuntu, Debian, MySQL, Firefox, Wordpress, VirtualBox and Gnome are among the winners."
Education and Certification
Call For Community Input: Linux Professional Institute "Job Task Analysis"
The Linux Professional Institute has sent out a call For Community Input on its Job Task Analysis program. "The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program (http://www.lpi.org). Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization's new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization)."
Novell and LPI partner on Linux training and certification
Novell and LPI have announced a training partnership. "Novell Inc. and The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) today announced an international partnership to standardize their entry-level Linux certification programs on LPIC-1. Under this program, Linux professionals who have earned their LPIC-1 status will also satisfy the requirements for the Novell® Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) certification. In addition, Novell Training Services has formally agreed to include required LPIC-1 learning objectives in its CLA course training material."
Calls for Presentations
ACM CCS 2010: Call for Workshop Proposals
A call for proposals has gone out for ACM CCS 2010, submissions are due by February 15. "Proposals are solicited for workshops to be held in conjunction with ACM CCS 2010. Each workshop provides a forum to address a specific topic at the forefront of security research. A workshop must be one full day in length."
Call for participation, registration now open for LinuxCon 2010
A call for participation has gone out for for LinuxCon 2010, the submission deadline is March 31. "LinuxCon 2010 August 10-12, 2010 Renaissance Boston Waterfront Boston, MA. After its inaugural year, LinuxCon has emerged as the premiere annual conference for Linux developers, IT administrators and executives in North America. The event brings together technical and business leadership for unmatched opportunities to collaborate and learn about all matters Linux."
Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit cfp
James Bottomley has announced this year's Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit, which will be held just prior to LinuxCon in Boston on August 8 and 9. It will be held in conjunction with the Virtual Memory (VM) summit, so there will be three tracks (storage, filesystems, VM) as well as joint meetings for all participants. Proposals for discussion topics and requests for invitations are being solicited; click below for the full announcement. "Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years".
X Developers' Summit 2010 call for papers
A call for papers has gone out for XDS 2010, it will take place on September 16-18 in Toulouse, France. "If you would like to present a talk on on-going work on X development, or presenting innovative uses of the X.Org technology, please submit your proposal on the wiki <http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDS2010/Program>, under 'Ideas', before July 31th."
Upcoming Events
Registration now open for DebConf10
DebConf10 registration is now open. "Registration is now open for DebConf10! DebConf10 will take place in New York City, USA from Sunday August 1st through Saturday Aug 7th, 2010, with arrivals at our group lodging permitted as of 3 PM on July 31 and departures required by 11 AM on August 8. The conference is preceded by DebCamp from July 25-31 including the arrival day"
PyCon 2010 brings speed enhancement to Python 3
PyCon 2010 will be held in Atlanta, GA on February 17-25. "Python 3 will zoom forward at PyCon 2010 with the incorporation of Unladen Swallow, a performance-boosting branch of Python initiated by engineers from Google. First made public at PyCon 2009, Unladen Swallow is already accelerating Python applications at several companies. Now the Unladen Swallow team plans to merge their code into Python 3's codebase, promising big speed improvements to Python 3 and a major new incentive for Python programmers to adopt the next-generation version of the Python language."
SCALE call for Lightning Talks
The Southern California Linux Expo has posted a call for lightning talks. "LOS ANGELES - Attendees at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) will be able to go "UpSCALE" on Friday, Feb. 19, as the expo provides a series of lightning talks that evening. Based on the O'Reilly Media "Ignite" talks which have occurred at OSCON, the UpSCALE talk is a presentation in which participants are given five minutes to talk on a subject, accompanied by 20 slides which are displayed for 15 seconds each."
Registration now open for Texas Linux Fest 2010
Registration is now open for the first ever Texas Linux Fest. It will be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin on Saturday April 10. There will also be evening social events on Friday and Saturday. "Exhibit space is filling up quickly, but if your company, organization, or open source project would like to reserve a booth, you can do so by visiting www.texaslinuxfest.org/sponsorship. There is still time for interested parties to submit a talk for consideration before the February 15 deadline." Click below for the full announcement.
UbuCon, FAD and Keysigning at SCALE
For those attending the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) there are some events that might be of interest. Ubuntu will hold a UbuCon and Fedora will hold a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) both on February 19, 2010. There will also be a keysigning party on February 20.Events: February 18, 2010 to April 19, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| March 1 March 5 |
Global Ignite week | Online, Online |
| March 2 March 4 |
djangoski | Whistler, Canada |
| March 2 March 5 |
FOSSGIS 2010 | Osnabrück, Germany |
| March 2 March 6 |
CeBIT Open Source | Hannover, Germany |
| March 5 March 6 |
Open Source Days 2010 | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| March 7 March 10 |
Bossa Conference 2010 | Recife, Brazil |
| March 13 March 19 |
DebCamp in Thailand | Khon Kaen, Thailand |
| March 15 March 18 |
Cloud Connect 2010 | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| March 16 March 18 |
Salon Linux 2010 | Paris, France |
| March 17 March 18 |
Commons, Users, Service Providers | Hannover, Germany |
| March 19 March 21 |
Panama MiniDebConf 2010 | Panama City, Panama |
| March 19 March 21 |
Libre Planet 2010 | Cambridge, MA, USA |
| March 19 March 20 |
Flourish 2010 Open Source Conference | Chicago, IL, USA |
| March 22 March 26 |
CanSecWest Vancouver 2010 | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| March 22 | OpenClinica Global Conference 2010 | Bethesda, MD, USA |
| March 23 March 25 |
UKUUG Spring 2010 Conference | Manchester, UK |
| March 25 March 28 |
PostgreSQL Conference East 2010 | Philadelphia, PA, USA |
| March 26 March 28 |
Ubuntu Global Jam | Online, World |
| March 30 April 1 |
Where 2.0 Conference | San Jose, CA, USA |
| April 9 April 11 |
Spanish DebConf | Coruña, Spain |
| April 10 | Texas Linux Fest | Austin, TX, USA |
| April 12 April 15 |
MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 12 April 14 |
Embedded Linux Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 14 April 16 |
Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit | San Francisco, USA |
| April 14 April 16 |
Lustre User Group 2010 | Aptos, California, USA |
| April 16 April 17 |
R/Finance 2010 Conference - 2nd Annual | Chicago, IL, US |
| April 16 | Drizzle Developer Day | Santa Clara, CA, United States |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Mailing Lists
Closing of support@gnome.org
The GNOME mailing sysadmin contact lists are being reorganized. "The following has been discontinued: support@gnome.org, helpdesk@gnome.org, etc Uses Request Tracker 3 on the background. Receives loads of spam and non-sysadmin related requests (distribution problems, jhbuild, etc)." Click below for the new contact info.
Audio and Video programs
Linux Foundation Announces 2010 "We're Linux" Video Contest
The Linux Foundation has announced the 2010 edition of the "We're Linux" video contest. "The contest is calling all community members and amateur filmmakers to share with the public what a 30-60 second Linux-focused spot for the Super Bowl might look like. This theme is not a requirement for entry; however, videos that can demonstrate the benefits of Linux to the general public are likely to receive more community votes. The submissions should aim to inspire people to use Linux, create conversations among the public, and convey the power and ideals of Linux."
Miscellaneous
Linux Conf raises $33,000 for charity (ComputerWorld)
ComputerWorld reports on the outcome of the charity auction at linux.conf.au. "A $12,750 donation from Linux Australia on the night brought the total funds raised for the air rescue service to more than $33,000. [...] 'Free open source software is founded on generosity and these supporters have certainly taken that value to heart,' Life Flight Trust CEO David Irving said in a statement. 'The funds raised will enable 13 people to receive emergency flights, which is a great outcome for the community.'"
Page editor: Forrest Cook