Announcements

UNRWA chooses OLPC Laptops with Sugar for Major Education Project in Mideast

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has announced a three-year program to provide a laptop loaded with the Sugar Learning Platform to Palestine refugee children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. ""Empowering the next generation through knowledge and learning is central to UNRWA's education projects. We are teaching 500,000 children in the Middle East every day and having all of them with a laptop will be huge contribution to bridging the technology and knowledge gap in one of the most troubled regions of the world", said Chris Gunness, UNWRA Spokesman."

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Collabora joins the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board

Collabora has joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board. "A long time supporter of GNOME and member of the GNOME community, Collabora contributes directly to GNOME projects like Empathy, PiTiVi, Totem and Epiphany."

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Announcing GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections Spring 2010

Nominations are open for the GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections until May 23, 2010. Voting begins May 30, 2010. Only valid GNOME foundation members may vote.

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Linux Fund UK Business Credit Card Available

The Linux Fund has announced the availability of a European credit card that supports Open Source projects and events with every card purchase. Businesses can apply for the card at www.linuxfund.org.

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Sony Sued For Removal Of Linux Support From PS3 (IGN)

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Sony for its removal of the "Other OS" feature from the PlayStation 3. "The suit, filed on April 27 by Anthony Ventura of California, seeks to redress Sony for the 'intentional disablement of the valuable functionality originally advertised as available' for the Playstation 3. The disabling of Linux support is not only in breach of the sales contract between Sony and its customers, the suit says, but also a deceptive business practice 'perpetrated on millions of unsuspecting customers.'" For a somewhat less neutral—potentially amusing—look see "Linux Users Spam Courts With Pointless Lawsuits" at totalplaystation.com.

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Charlie Stross: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

Science fiction author Charlie Stross peers into the future to try to understand the latest Adobe vs. Apple squabbling. In particular, he's referring to Steve Jobs's recent missive about Flash. "Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That's the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit."

Also of note is a reinterpretation of Jobs's statement (seen at BoingBoing) which substitutes "Apple" for "Adobe" and "closed" for "Flash", with amusing results: "Apple's closed products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Apple, and Apple has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Apple's closed products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Apple and available only from Apple. By almost any definition, closed is a closed system."

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Dianne Hackborn: Multitasking the Android Way

Android developer Dianne Hackborn looks at how Android does multitasking. "A common misunderstanding about Android multitasking is the difference between a process and an application. In Android these are not tightly coupled entities: applications may seem present to the user without an actual process currently running the app; multiple applications may share processes, or one application may make use of multiple processes depending on its needs; the process(es) of an application may be kept around by Android even when that application is not actively doing something."

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Roy: Jobs on Theora

Hugo Roy has posted an email said to be from Steve Jobs on Ogg Theora: "All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source."

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Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit (opensource.com)

Red Hat assistant general counsel Rob Tiller writes about the IP Innovation case on opensource.com. "It was clear during jury selection that our jurors had no prior knowledge of, or experience with, open source. Plaintiffs attempted to exploit this inexperience by arguing that open source software involved behavior that was, if not downright illegal, at least ethically dubious. They promoted the fallacy that open source distributors unfairly take the property of others and thereby unfairly profit. They also suggested that Red Hat's public criticisms of the U.S. patent system as it relates to software and related calls for legal reform were un-American and indicated a secret fondness for the writings of Karl Marx."

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Nokia and Intel defensive on MeeGo Linux patents (Register)

The Register ponders the future of MeeGo with an emphasis on patent issues. "Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of MeeGo devices, told The Reg Tuesday that Intel and Nokia could 'guarantee and promise' that MeeGo is safe from any and all patent claims because of the size and breadth of the companies' patent portfolios, and also because of the size of Intel and Nokia themselves."

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H.264, patent licensing, and you (Engadget)

Engadget tries to clarify the patent situation around the H.264 codec. "So the real choice for most companies is to sign up with H.264 and the MPEG-LA in return for a baseline level of legal protection and broad compatibility with a codec that's been widely adopted in the market, or to go with Theora, save the money upfront and risk a patent lawsuit down the road while shipping a potentially inferior product. Depending on your point of view, that's either quite a racket the MPEG-LA's got going or it's just ruthless tech industry business as usual, but there's the fundamental situation."

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Red Hat and Novell fend off a patent troll

LWN covered the IP Innovations patent infringement suit back in 2007. Now Groklaw reports that defendants Red Hat and Novell have won that suit by virtue of having invalidated the patents. "This is the result we expected and we are gratified that the jury recognized the tremendous innovative value of open source software. The jury knocked out three invalid patents that were masquerading as a new and important inventions, when they were not".

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EFF Seeks to Protect Innovation for Social Network Users

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed an amicus brief urging a federal judge to dismiss Facebook's claims that criminal law is violated when its users opt for an add-on service that helps them aggregate their information from a variety of social networking sites. "EFF argues in an amicus brief filed Monday that users have the right to choose how they access their data, and turning any violation of terms of use into a criminal law violation would leave millions of Facebook users unwittingly vulnerable to prosecution."

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CE Linux Forum Newsletter: April 2010

The April 2010 edition of the CELF newsletter covers Embedded Linux Conference 2010 report, LinuxCon Japan 2010 - Call for Participation Closes on May 14, Call for Presentations: Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) 2010, CELF Announces Contract Work for 2010, eLinux wiki Editor Contest, and Recent Content Added To The eLinux wiki.

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FSFE founder Georg Greve awarded German Cross of Merit

Georg Greve, founding president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, has received the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. Georg received this award from the German President for his work on Free Software and Open Standards. ""FSFE is very proud to have a 'knight' among its team," says FSFE's president Karsten Gerloff. "Georg's tremendous dedication to freedom in technology has been a driving force for Free Software in Europe and around the world. He has put Free Software on the political agenda, and has created the structures to harness the community's energy towards our common goals. His hard work over more than a decade has brought enormous progress for Free Software.""

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ELC-EUROPE call for proposals

CE Linux Forum has announced the Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC-E) will take place October 27-28, 2010, in Cambridge, UK. Proposals for presentations, demos and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions must be received by June 30, 2010.

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Community Leadership Summit, July 17-18, Portland

On Linux.com, Jono Bacon posted a reminder about the Community Leadership Summit, which will be held just before OSCON, July 17-18 in Portland, Oregon. "This is the second incarnation of the popular event designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more."

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GStreamer Conference 2010 Announced

The first GStreamer Conference will take place in Cambridge, United Kingdom on October 26, 2010. "In conjuction with the CE Linux Conference Europe we are happy to host and arrange the first full day conference focusing on GStreamer and related technologies. Speakers from a wide range of companies and fields will attend to speak about available GStreamer technologies and future developments."

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Events: May 13, 2010 to July 12, 2010

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
June 7 June 10	RailsConf 2010	Baltimore, MD, USA
June 7 June 9	German Perl Workshop 2010	Schorndorf, Germany
June 9 June 12	LinuxTag	Berlin, Germany
June 9 June 11	PyCon Asia Pacific 2010	Singapore, Singapore
June 10 June 11	Mini-DebConf at LinuxTag 2010	Berlin, Germany
June 12 June 13	SouthEast Linux Fest	Spartanburg, SC, USA
June 15 June 16	Middle East and Africa Open Source Software Technology Forum	Cairo, Egypt
June 19	FOSSCon	Rochester, New York, USA
June 21 June 25	Semantic Technology Conference 2010	San Francisco, CA, USA
June 22 June 25	Red Hat Summit	Boston, USA
June 23 June 24	Open Source Data Center Conference 2010	Nuremberg, Germany
June 26 June 27	PyCon Australia	Sydney, Australia
June 28 July 3	SciPy 2010	Austin, TX, USA
July 1 July 4	Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe	Grodno, Belarus
July 3 July 10	Akademy	Tampere, Finland
July 6 July 9	Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems	Brussels, Belgium
July 6 July 11	11th Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre	Bordeaux, France
July 9 July 11	State Of The Map 2010	Girona, Spain

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

MeeGo Presentations from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

Linux.com's MeeGo Blog collects all the MeeGo presentations from the Linux Collaboration Summit. "The MeeGo project was featured in two keynotes and an all day session during the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit."

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