Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
OpenOffice.org community members launch the Document Foundation
A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of The Document Foundation, intended to carry forward development of OpenOffice.org as an independent free software project. "Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand 'LibreOffice' has been chosen for the software going forward." Supporting organizations include Canonical, Google, Novell, and Red Hat.
XtreemOS Announces Public Access to Open Test Bed
The XtreemOS consortium has announced the opening of a publicly accessible test bed for the XtreemOS grid operating system. "XtreemOS is a set of technologies developed on top of Mandriva Linux to enable ease of use on clusters and grids. XtreemOS has been developed over the past 4 years by an international consortium of 19 academic and industrial partners. When asked why the consortium decided to open their test bed, Dr. Christine Morin, a research director at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Infomatique et Automatique) replied, "We wanted to concretely demonstrate our efforts over the past four years, as well as to seek interest from other computer researchers and scientists to participate in the future development of XtreemOS." Dr Morin organized and has been the scientific coordinator for the XtreemOS project since its inception in 2006."
Commercial announcements
Red Hat Reports Second Quarter Results
Red Hat has announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter ended August 31, 2010. "Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year."
Articles of interest
The Defenders of Free Software (New York Times)
Here's a profile of Armijn Hemel and his GPL enforcement work in the New York Times. "Lawsuits are typically settled out of court. For example, after Cisco was sued over the software included in its home routers; it agreed to make the software code available, tapped a point person to be responsible for open-source issues and paid an undisclosed amount to settle the case. Representatives of companies dealing with these complaints say it's a far more amicable engagement than one would find in the proprietary software world, where hard-charging lawyers come seeking serious payback for what they view as violations of intellectual property rules."
Can academia "release early, release often?" (opensource.com)
Over at opensource.com, Fedora project member and Red Hat intern Ian Weller reflects on what was learned in a project to create an open source textbook, Practical Open Source Software Exploration. In particular, he notes the difference between the release cycles in open source and academia. "Here's where we again saw the gap between the release cycles of open source and those in academia. The open source release cycle is 'release early, release often'—even though your goals are known, milestones are often unknown, and it's possible that even the end result is unknown. Professors know when every milestone—every semester—begins and ends, and students know exactly what they're going to learn in a given semester, but they don't always know what the end goal is."
Project Porting MeeGo OS To Android Phones Starting To Yield Results (Android Police)
The Android Police site reports that a group of developers is getting to the point where it is possible to run MeeGo on a Nexus One handset. "Right now, its unclear exactly how functional the OS is, and, as usual, the development is suffering from issues with driver cross-compatibility and other similar obstacles. One particular stumbling block appears to be the closed-source nature of Qualcomm 3D drivers, preventing hardware acceleration of the user interface and resulting in painfully slow response times."
CodePlex Foundation becomes Outercurve Foundation (The H)
The H reports that the CodePlex Foundation has changed its name to the Outercurve Foundation. "Since its launch, the CodePlex Foundation has been confused by some with Microsoft's CodePlex.com project hosting platform, despite the fact that the former is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open source collaboration between corporations and the community and the latter is a Microsoft-owned site for hosting open source projects." LWN covered the launch of the CodePlex Foundation in September 2009.
Legal Announcements
Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski
The Red Hat legal team has submitted comments to the U.S Patent and Trademark Office. "The submission was made in response to the PTO's request for public comments to assist it in determining how to apply the Supreme Court's decision in that case. Although the Bilski decision did not expressly address the standards for refusing to allow software patents, interpretation of the decision will determine whether certain patents are granted. Thus the PTO's approach to examining patent applications will have a substantial effect on the patent landscape. Red Hat previously submitted an amicus brief in Bilski. Its comments to the PTO indicate its continuing commitment to reform of the patent system to address the harms caused by poor quality software patents." (Thanks to Davide Del Vento)
New Books
The Agile Samurai--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has released "The Agile Samurai" by Jonathan Rasmusson.REST in Practice--New from O'Reilly
O'Reilly has released "REST in Practice" by Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson.
Calls for Presentations
Southern Plumbers Miniconf CFP (LCA 2011 - Brisbane)
There will be a Southern Plumbers Miniconf at the 2011 linux.conf.au on January 24, 2011, in Brisbane, Australia. The call for submissions will be open until October 29, 2010.Call for proposals -- PyCon 2011
PyCon 2011 will be held March 9-17, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. "The PyCon conference days will be March 11-13, preceded by two tutorial days (March 9-10), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 14-17)." The call for proposals for the formal presentation tracks is open until November 10, 2010.
Upcoming Events
Open Video Conference streamed live in WebM
Flumotion will be streaming the Open Video Conference live using the open formats WebM and Ogg / Vorbis / Theora. "The OVC is an annual summit organized and hosted by the Open Video Alliance (OVA), a coalition of organizations and individuals committed to the idea that the power of moving image should belong to everyone. This year's OVC takes place between 1-2 October in New York City, with the conference drawing a broad and unique audience of connected creatives and change makers, who all share the vision of an open video ecosystem."
Events: October 7, 2010 to December 6, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| November 8 November 10 |
Free Open Source Academia Conference | Grenoble, France |
| November 9 November 12 |
OpenStack Design Summit | San Antonio, TX, USA |
| November 11 | NLUUG Fall conference: Security | Ede, Netherlands |
| November 11 November 13 |
8th International Firebird Conference 2010 | Bremen, Germany |
| November 12 November 14 |
FOSSASIA | Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam |
| November 12 November 13 |
Japan Linux Conference | Tokyo, Japan |
| November 12 November 13 |
Mini-DebConf in Vietnam 2010 | Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam |
| November 13 November 14 |
OpenRheinRuhr | Oberhausen, Germany |
| November 15 November 17 |
MeeGo Conference 2010 | Dublin, Ireland |
| November 18 November 21 |
Piksel10 | Bergen, Norway |
| November 20 November 21 |
OpenFest - Bulgaria's biggest Free and Open Source conference | Sofia, Bulgaria |
| November 20 November 21 |
Kiwi PyCon 2010 | Waitangi, New Zealand |
| November 20 November 21 |
WineConf 2010 | Paris, France |
| November 23 November 26 |
DeepSec | Vienna, Austria |
| November 24 November 26 |
Open Source Developers' Conference | Melbourne, Australia |
| November 27 | Open Source Conference Shimane 2010 | Shimane, Japan |
| November 27 | 12. LinuxDay 2010 | Dornbirn, Austria |
| November 29 November 30 |
European OpenSource & Free Software Law Event | Torino, Italy |
| December 4 | London Perl Workshop 2010 | London, United Kingdom |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol