Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
Women in free software: Recommendations from the Women's Caucus
Last September, the Free Software Foundation held a mini-summit to investigate ways to increase the participation by women in the free software community. Four separate "findings and recommendations" from the Women's Caucus that was formed at the summit have been published today. "
Not enough young women are being exposed to free software. Middle school and high school are when girls potentially have the time and interest to tinker and try new things, but all too often access to public computers means running proprietary software. The Caucus is working on a plan to get free software into girls' hands, teach them how to use it and how to get the most out of free software." Click below for the full announcement.
FSFE Welcomes New 'Software Interactions' Document From The European, Legal Network
The Free Software Foundation Europe has announced the release of a new educational document on Free Software licensing. "Developed by delegates of the European Legal Network, the document helps software developers and lawyers by making it easier to decide under which licenses they can distribute their work."
Articles of interest
Mozilla Would Like to Pick Your Brain - Revising the MPL (Groklaw)
Here's a Groklaw article on the update to the Mozilla Public License and license updates in general. "What I'm trying to express is simply this: it's time to seriously focus on license drafting. The purpose of lawyers is to protect your interests, to draft language that looks down the road a piece and tries to head off troubles. I think after SCO and the toy train case, we can assume there will be troubles. It would be derelict not to let the lawyers do what they do best and protect us. I know what some of you are feeling right now: sad. I feel it too. The community was built on trust, and I'm saying that now it can't be like that totally any more."
Kuhn: At Least Motorola Admits It
On his blog, Bradley M. Kuhn looks at Motorola's decision to lock-down its Droid X and Droid 2 phones. "I appreciate the fact that [Motorola's Lori] Fraleigh and Motorola are honest in their disdain for software developers. Unlike Apple — who tries to hide how developer-unfriendly its mobile platform is — Motorola readily admits that they seek to leave developers as helpless as possible, refusing to share the necessary tools that developers need to upgrade devices and to improve themselves, their community, and their software. Companies like Motorola and Apple both seek to squelch the healthy hacker tendency to make technology better for everyone." A related issue to ponder is the report that the Droid X will turn into an expensive brick if you try to change its firmware.
Neary: Rotten to the (Open) Core?
Dave Neary steps into the open core debate on his blog. Part of the problem is that people have divergent definitions of open core, he says. "There is another name for this which is even more pejorative, Crippleware. Deliberately hobbled software. And that's what I think gets people riled up — if you're releasing something as free software, then there should at least be the pretence that you are giving the community the opportunity to fend for itself — even if that is by providing an "unofficial" git tree where the community can code up GPL features competing with your commercial offering, or a nice forum for people to share templates, themes and extensions and fend for themselves. But what gets people riled is hearing a company call themselves "an Open Source company" when most of the users of their "open source" product do not have software freedom. It's disingenuous, and it is indeed brand dilution."
New Books
Advanced Qt Programming
"Advanced Qt Programming" by Mark Summerfield is available from Prentice Hall.Hello, Android, Third Edition--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
The Pragmatic Bookshelf has released "Hello, Android", Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, third edition, by Ed Burnette.
Calls for Presentations
linux.conf.au 2011 CFP opens
The Call for Papers for the 2011 edition of linux.conf.au has opened. The conference will be held January 24-29 in Brisbane, Australia. The CFP is open until August 7; more information can be found on the papers page. "The theme of this years conference is 'follow the flow'. The warm and friendly river-side Brisbane will be hosting the best linux.conf.au ever. What does the theme 'follow the flow mean'? It is about the growing movement of open source, whether its down at the kernel level or over in libre graphics."
3rd Call For Papers, 17th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference 2010
The call for papers for this year's Tcl/Tk Conference is open until August 1, 2010. The conference takes place October 11-15, 2010 in Chicago/Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois, USA.UTOSC 2010 Call for papers extended through August 1st
The call for papers for the Utah Open Source Conference has been extended until August 1, 2010. The conference takes place October 7-9, 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Upcoming Events
DrupalCon Copenhagen
The Drupal Association will be hosting European DrupalCon 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark, August 23-27. Dries Buytaert, the project's founder will be giving his regular 'State of Drupal' update as one of the event's keynote presentations. More program information can be found here.FOSS4G 2010
FOSS4G 2010 will be held in Barcelona, Spain, September 6-9, 2010. Abstracts and Presentations have been posted.Events: July 29, 2010 to September 27, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| July 24 July 30 |
Gnome Users And Developers European Conference | The Hague, The Netherlands |
| July 25 July 31 |
Debian Camp @ DebConf10 | New York City, USA |
| July 31 August 1 |
PyOhio | Columbus, Ohio, USA |
| August 1 August 7 |
DebConf10 | New York, NY, USA |
| August 4 August 6 |
YAPC::Europe 2010 - The Renaissance of Perl | Pisa, Italy |
| August 7 August 8 |
Debian MiniConf in India | Pune, India |
| August 9 August 10 |
KVM Forum 2010 | Boston, MA, USA |
| August 9 | Linux Security Summit 2010 | Boston, MA, USA |
| August 10 August 12 |
LinuxCon | Boston, USA |
| August 13 | Debian Day Costa Rica | Desamparados, Costa Rica |
| August 14 | Summercamp 2010 | Ottawa, Canada |
| August 14 August 15 |
Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters | Taipei, Taiwan |
| August 21 August 22 |
Free and Open Source Software Conference | St. Augustin, Germany |
| August 23 August 27 |
European DrupalCon | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| August 28 | PyTexas 2010 | Waco, TX, USA |
| August 31 September 3 |
OOoCon 2010 | Budapest, Hungary |
| August 31 September 1 |
LinuxCon Brazil 2010 | São Paulo, Brazil |
| September 6 September 9 |
Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference | Barcelona, Spain |
| September 7 September 9 |
DjangoCon US 2010 | Portland, OR, USA |
| September 8 September 10 |
CouchCamp: CouchDB summer camp | Petaluma, CA, United States |
| September 10 September 12 |
Ohio Linux Fest | Columbus, Ohio, USA |
| September 11 | Open Tech 2010 | London, UK |
| September 13 September 15 |
Open Source Singapore Pacific-Asia Conference | Sydney, Australia |
| September 16 September 18 |
X Developers' Summit | Toulouse, France |
| September 16 September 17 |
Magnolia-CMS | Basel, Switzerland |
| September 16 September 17 |
3rd International Conference FOSS Sea 2010 | Odessa, Ukraine |
| September 17 September 18 |
FrOSCamp | Zürich, Switzerland |
| September 17 September 19 |
Italian Debian/Ubuntu Community Conference 2010 | Perugia, Italy |
| September 18 September 19 |
WordCamp Portland | Portland, OR, USA |
| September 18 | Software Freedom Day 2010 | Everywhere, Everywhere |
| September 21 September 24 |
Linux-Kongress | Nürnberg, Germany |
| September 23 | Open Hardware Summit | New York, NY, USA |
| September 24 September 25 |
BruCON Security Conference 2010 | Brussels, Belgium |
| September 25 September 26 |
PyCon India 2010 | Bangalore, India |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol