Announcements

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Simon Phipps ponders contributor agreements, and copyright assignment policies in particular in ComputerWorld. "Even with these benefits available, there are many communities that choose not to aggregate their copyrights - notably the Linux kernel, GNOME, Apache and Mozilla communities. The recent policy and guidelines on copyright assignment by the GNOME Foundations are especially worth reading. Having diverse copyright ownership leads to a deeper mutual trust and an assurance that the playing-field remains level. Insisting on copyright aggregation is one of the more certain ways a company can ensure the open source community it is seeding remains small and lacking co-developers."

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Hold The Celebrations; H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters (ComputerWorld UK)

Over at ComputerWorld UK, Simon Phipps says there is nothing to celebrate in the recent announcement [PDF] that MPEG-LA will not charge royalties on "web uses" of the H.264 codec for the remaining life of the patents it administers. "First, the H.264-format video needs to be created - but that isn't free under this move. Then it needs to be served up for streaming - but that isn't free under this move. There then needs to be support for decoding it in your browser - but adding that isn't free under this move. Finally it needs to be displayed on your screen. [...] The only part of this sequence being left untaxed is the final one. Importantly, they are not offering to leave the addition of support for H.264 decoding in your browser untaxed. In particular, this means the Mozilla Foundation would have to pay to include the technology in Firefox." He also posits that MPEG-LA may try to join forces with Oracle and Paul Allen's Interval Research to create a three-way patent attack on Google—this time against WebM.

Comments (75 posted)

Google bails out of JavaOne

It should probably surprise nobody that Google has announced that its employees will not be attending JavaOne this year. "So we’re sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally."

Comments (114 posted)

Novell Disappoints as Ownership Concerns Continue (Datamation)

Datamation looks at Novell's third quarter financial results, which have fallen short of the company's projections. "The decline in revenues in the third quarter extended across Novell's multiple product lines, including its security-management and operating platforms, as well as its Linux business. Novell's reported revenue of $108 million for its security-management and operating platforms, down 2 percent year-over-year. Earlier this week, Novell announced a new cloud security service to manage access, identity and compliance. Novell's SUSE Linux platform products revenue in the third quarter netted $36 million, a decline of 7 percent from the third quarter of 2009. " (Thanks to Don Marti)

Comments (5 posted)

GCC - 'We make free software affordable' (The H)

Richard Hillesley delves into the history of GCC over at the H. "GCC began life as the GNU C Compiler and achieved its first release on March 22, 1987. Michael Tiemann, who contributed as much as anyone to the later development of GCC, and who had dreamed of writing the perfect compiler, said that the day of GCC's release was "the most thrilling and most terrifying day of my life (up to that point).""

Comments (13 posted)

Fedora trademark defense -- you can help!

Red Hat legal is looking for help in defending the Fedora trademark. "Red Hat Legal is currently working on just such a defense. They've asked me to pass on a request for assistance in gathering physical evidence of our use of the Fedora logo worldwide prior to *January 30, 2007*."

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Welte: More GPL enforcement work again.. and a very surreal but important case

On his blog, Harald Welte writes about work he is doing as part of the gpl-violations.org project. "Right now I'm facing what I'd consider the most outrageous case that I've been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either." If the manufacturer were to succeed with its claims, it could jeopardize many different projects that provide alternate code for devices, he says.

Comments (22 posted)

Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has released "Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior" by Justin Cutroni.

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web2py book 3rd ed

The third edition of the web2py book is available from lulu.com. It's also available in PDF or html.

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CE Linux Forum Newsletter: August 2010

The CE Linux Forum newsletter for August covers Embedded Linux Conference Europe Program Announced, LinuxCon Japan, SquashFS Support for LZO Accepted into Mainline, 34th Japan Technical Jamboree, and eLinux wiki Moving to a New Host.

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Program announced for Embedded Linux Conference Europe

The program for the Embedded Linux Conference Europe has been announced. The conference will be held October 26-28 in Cambridge, UK, and will be co-located with the GStreamer conference on October 26. "The conference will host almost 50 sessions, including presentations, Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, keynotes and tutorials." Some of the speakers include Ari Rauch, Ralf Baechle, Wolfram Sang, Armijn Hemel, Kevin Hillman, Wookey, Grant Likely, and Frank Rowand. Click below for the full announcement.

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Linux Plumbers Conference announces opening keynote and presentations

The Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced that Jonathan Corbet—a name that may be familiar to LWN readers—will be the opening keynote speaker at the conference. LPC will be held in Cambridge, MA November 3-5. "We're also pleased to announce that speakers have been selected for the presentation track. Click here for the full list of accepted presentations. We're very excited about this year's speaker line up, and we're equally excited about the broad range of topics proposed for the micro-conferences. It is shaping up to be an interesting and productive conference." Early bird registration ($275) ends on August 31.

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Events: September 9, 2010 to November 8, 2010

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
September 27 September 29	Japan Linux Symposium	Tokyo, Japan
September 27 September 28	Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems	Tokyo, Japan
September 29	3rd Firebird Conference - Moscow	Moscow, Russia
September 30 October 1	Open World Forum	Paris, France
October 1 October 2	Open Video Conference	New York, NY, USA
October 1	Firebird Day Paris - La Cinémathèque Française	Paris, France
October 3 October 4	Foundations of Open Media Software 2010	New York, NY, USA
October 4 October 5	IRILL days - where FOSS developers, researchers, and communities meet	Paris, France
October 7 October 9	Utah Open Source Conference	Salt Lake City, UT, USA
October 8 October 9	Free Culture Research Conference	Berlin, Germany
October 11 October 15	17th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference	Chicago/Oakbrook Terrace, IL, USA
October 12 October 13	Linux Foundation End User Summit	Jersey City, NJ, USA
October 12	Eclipse Government Day	Reston, VA, USA
October 16	FLOSS UK Unconference Autumn 2010	Birmingham, UK
October 16	Central PA Open Source Conference	Harrisburg, PA, USA
October 18 October 21	7th Netfilter Workshop	Seville, Spain
October 18 October 20	Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference	Portland, OR, USA
October 19 October 20	Open Source in Mobile World	London, United Kingdom
October 20 October 23	openSUSE Conference 2010	Nuremberg, Germany
October 22 October 24	OLPC Community Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
October 25 October 27	GitTogether '10	Mountain VIew, CA, USA
October 25 October 27	Real Time Linux Workshop	Nairobi, Kenya
October 25 October 27	GCC & GNU Toolchain Developers’ Summit	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
October 25 October 29	Ubuntu Developer Summit	Orlando, Florida, USA
October 26	GStreamer Conference 2010	Cambridge, UK
October 27	Open Source Health Informatics Conference	London, UK
October 27 October 29	Hack.lu 2010	Parc Hotel Alvisse, Luxembourg
October 27 October 28	Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2010	Cambridge, UK
October 27 October 28	Government Open Source Conference 2010	Portland, OR, USA
October 28 October 29	European Conference on Computer Network Defense	Berlin, Germany
October 28 October 29	Free Software Open Source Symposium	Toronto, Canada
October 30 October 31	Debian MiniConf Paris 2010	Paris, France
November 1 November 2	Linux Kernel Summit	Cambridge, MA, USA
November 1 November 5	ApacheCon North America 2010	Atlanta, GA, USA
November 3 November 5	Linux Plumbers Conference	Cambridge, MA, USA
November 4	2010 LLVM Developers' Meeting	San Jose, CA, USA
November 5 November 7	Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit	Gorthenburg, Sweden
November 6 November 7	Technical Dutch Open Source Event	Eindhoven, Netherlands
November 6 November 7	OpenOffice.org HackFest 2010	Hamburg, Germany

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

View Keynote and Conference Session Videos from LinuxCon 2010

Videos from all of the keynotes sessions and a number of conference sessions from LinuxCon 2010 are now available to everyone for viewing. Registration is required.

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