Announcements

FSF Advocates Free Software for U.S. IPEC Joint Strategic Plan

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has responded to the United States executive Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) Joint Strategic Plan. "The FSF argues that the government should use free software to provide more freedom and transparency to its constituents and reduce the need to engage in costly copyright enforcement activities on behalf of proprietary software companies. The FSF states that "the most egregious harms to the public interest in the areas of copyright and patents come not from a lack of enforcement, but from extraordinarily excessive enforcement.""

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2010 Google Summer of Code applications now being accepted

Google is now accepting applications for the 2010 Summer of Code program. "For our sixth Google Summer of Code, students can choose from 150 Free and Open Source software projects, in technical areas as diverse as gaming to humanitarian efforts to operating system design."

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Sony Playstation to lose Linux installation capability

As described in this Playstation.com weblog entry, the upcoming Playstation v3.21 firmware update will remove the "install other OS" option from the system. "In addition, disabling the 'Other OS' feature will help ensure that PS3 owners will continue to have access to the broad range of gaming and entertainment content from SCE and its content partners on a more secure system." Incidentally, once the firmware update is made, anything on a Linux partition will be immediately lost forever, and not applying the update will cause the system to operate at reduced functionality. This move runs contrary to promises to PS3 owners made in the recent past.

There is a press release in Japanese which can be turned into something resembling English with Google Translate.

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Red Hat Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2010 Results

Red Hat has announced financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended February 28, 2010. "Total revenue for the quarter was $195.9 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $169.2 million, up 21% year-over-year. For the full year, total revenue was $748.2 million, an increase of 15% over the prior year, and subscription revenue was $638.7 million, up 18% year-over-year."

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Villa: A community of FOSS lawyers?

Luis Villa writes about the emerging FOSS legal community on opensource.com. "Despite all that, the FOSS law community is still growing- which is a testament to the power of the collaborative model. To me, the heart of the test for 'are people a community' is 'can I call on a known group of people for help in a pinch, and would they feel comfortable doing the same of me.' In this informal, unstructured way, there is definitely a growing FOSS legal community of shared interests and relationships."

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Hacker vows to fight Sony PS3 update, restore Linux support (ars technica)

Ars technica reports that hacker George Hotz aims to restore the Other OS option on the PlayStation3. "The wins Hotz has enjoyed in playing with the system were enough to make Sony nervous, and taking away Linux hasn't made many gamers happy. Catching the interest of someone who clearly has both the time and the knowledge to open the system wider isn't likely to end well for Sony; Hotz may not be interested in piracy, but the more capabilities put into the hands of the cracking community the more likely that outcome is going to be. Sony knows just how damaging piracy can be to a platform-the PSP has suffered from that problem almost since launch-but taking away features and claiming security concerns may have simply given the issue more attention than it deserved."

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Governmental free software preferences are legal in Italy

The Italian constitutional court has ruled that the Piedmont region can legally maintain a preference for free software in its purchasing decisions. According to the court, this preference is for a caratteristica (characteristic) of the software, rather than for a specific product or technology. Click below for the press release (in Italian) from L'Associazione per il Software Libero, or see the English, French, or Spanish versions.

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Decision in the SCO Group vs. Novell Jury trial

Novell reports that the jury in the District Court of Utah trial between SCO Group and Novell issued a verdict in favor of Novell. "Novell is very pleased with the jury's decision confirming Novell's ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux. Novell remains committed to promoting Linux, including by defending Linux on the intellectual property front."

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Elan Seeks to Block Apple Ipad Sales Over Patent (Bloomberg)

The phone-related patent mess is getting deeper: Bloomberg reports that a company called Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple for patent infringement. It seems that Elan owns patent #5,825,352, which discloses the process of detecting two fingers on a touch pad - something nobody would have ever thought of otherwise. "That patent was affirmed after a California district court found Synaptics Inc. infringed that same technology in a 2008 ruling, Elan said." One assumes that Elan does not plan to stop here.

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Linux Foundation Newsletter: March 2010

This issue of the Linux Foundation Newsletter covers Linux.com Store Opens, Design Contest Launches; 2010 Linux.com Gurus Announced; New Program Additions for Collaboration Summit; Call for Participation for LinuxCon Closes March 31; Call for Participation Opens for LinuxCon Japan; 2010 "We're Linux" Video Contest Enters Final Weeks; Linux Foundation in the News; and Upcoming Training Course from Linux Foundation.

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O'Reilly: The state of the Internet operating system

Tim O'Reilly has posted a lengthy article about the "Internet operating system." "This is the crux of my argument about the internet operating system. We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of 'the Great Game', the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them 'points of control'.) This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends."

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Linux Training provided to drive growth of Open Source professionals in Nigeria

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced that its affiliate organization, LPI-Nigeria, has successfully completed a program of free Linux training for young people. "Lifeforte International High School (Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria), the LPI-Nigeria affiliate, has undertaken a two year program of training, Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) exam lab events, and other special initiatives with the country's National Youth Service Corps and government agencies to promote this goal."

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GNOME Foundation Meeting Minutes Published

The minutes for the March 18, 2010 meeting of the GNOME Foundation are available. Topics include GnuCash automation, Friends of GNOME sysadmin announcement, Annual Report Update, Brazilian GNOME events, The Idlelo Conference, Hackfests, and more.

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Operating System Platform for Embedded Real-Time applications 2010

Sixth International Workshop on Operating Systems Platforms for Embedded Real-Time Applications (OSPERT 2010) will take place July 6, 2010 in conjunction with the 22nd Euromicro Intl Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS10) in Brussels, Belgium. The call for papers is open until April 4, 2010.

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Linux Users' Group of Davis, April 2010 events

The Linux Users' Group of Davis (LUGOD) will be holding three events this April in Davis, California. There will be a Linux Installfest Workshop April 3, 2010, a social gathering April 6, 2010, and a general meeting April 19, 2010.

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Events: April 8, 2010 to June 7, 2010

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
April 23 April 25	FOSS Nigeria 2010	Kano, Nigeria
April 23 April 25	QuahogCon 2010	Providence, RI, USA
April 24 April 25	OSDC.TW 2010	Taipei, Taiwan
April 24 April 25	BarCamb 3	Cambridge, UK
April 24	Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre	Many, Many
April 24 April 25	Fosscomm 2010	Thessaloniki, Greece
April 24 April 25	LinuxFest Northwest	Bellingham WA, USA
April 24	Open Knowledge Conference 2010	London, UK
April 24 April 26	First International Workshop on Free/Open Source Software Technologies	Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
April 25 April 29	Interop Las Vegas	Las Vegas, NV, USA
April 28 April 29	Xen Summit North America at AMD	Sunnyvale, CA, USA
April 29	Patents and Free and Open Source Software	Boulder, CO, USA
May 1 May 2	OggCamp	Liverpool, England
May 1 May 4	Linux Audio Conference	Utrecht, NL
May 1 May 2	Devops Down Under	Sydney, Australia
May 3 May 7	SambaXP 2010	Göttingen, Germany
May 3 May 6	Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 6	NLUUG spring conference: System Administration	Ede, The Netherlands
May 7 May 9	Pycon Italy	Firenze, Italy
May 7 May 8	Professional IT Community Conference	New Brunswick, NJ, USA
May 10 May 14	Ubuntu Developer Summit	Brussels, Belgium
May 17 May 21	Fourth African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons	Accra, Ghana
May 18 May 21	PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
May 24 May 25	Netbook Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 24 May 30	Plone Symposium East 2010	State College, PA, USA
May 24 May 26	DjangoCon Europe	Berlin, Germany
May 27 May 30	Libre Graphics Meeting	Brussels, Belgium
June 1 June 4	Open Source Bridge	Portland, Oregon, USA
June 3 June 4	Athens IT Security Conference	Athens, Greece

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