Announcements

Software Freedom Conservancy appoints Kuhn as full-time executive director

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced the appointment of Bradley M. Kuhn as its full-time executive director. The SFC provides a non-profit home for member free software projects—such as Mercurial, BusyBox, Samba, Inkscape, and 18 others—without the projects having to obtain and maintain individual non-profit status. "Kuhn brings to Conservancy two decades of experience in software freedom volunteerism and ten years of non-profit management and organizational experience. From 2001 to 2005, Kuhn was Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation in Boston, MA. More recently, from 2005 to 2010, Kuhn worked as Policy Analyst and Technology Director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC)." On his blog, and the SFC blog, Kuhn adds: "For four years, I have worked part-time on nights, weekends, and lunch times to keep Conservancy running and to implement and administer the services that Conservancy provides to its member projects. It's actual quite a relief to now have full-time attention available to carry out this important work."

Comments (2 posted)

GNOME Quarterly Report

They are running a bit behind, but the GNOME Foundation has released the GNOME Quarterly Report for the second quarter of 2010. Several GNOME teams have updates in this report, including the Board of Directors, Localization, GNOME Marketing, Bug Squad, GNOME Outreach Program for Women, Membership, Usability, GNOME Mobile, Art Team, Documentation Team, Travel Committee, GNOME Events, Release Team, and Finance.

Comments (none posted)

Black Duck acquires Ohloh

Black Duck Software has announced the acquisition of the Ohloh.net site from Geeknet. "Black Duck plans to use the acquisition to help enhance and expand FOSS adoption by making it easier for developers to tap the huge body of high-quality code in open source projects, and collaborate with their peers through the Ohloh community. By working with the FOSS community, including forges, foundations and other code repositories as well as individual projects and developers, Black Duck will expand and enrich Ohloh with improved data and new productivity tools. Black Duck will integrate Ohloh assets with Black Duck's free code search site Koders.com, and will infuse it with a complete set of FOSS project data from Black Duck's comprehensive KnowledgeBase, to create a single premier web destination that developers can turn to as a trusted source of FOSS knowledge."

Comments (6 posted)

WebP, a new image format for the Web (The Chromium Blog)

On its Chromium Blog, Google has announced a new image format called WebP. It is based on techniques from Google's recently open-sourced VP8 video codec and shows some significant size reductions for image data. There is also a gallery available to compare original and WebP-compressed images. "While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image." (Thanks to Martin Jeppesen.)

Comments (33 posted)

Red Hat settles patent case with Acacia - shares few details (InternetNews.com)

Sean Michael Kerner shares his concerns that Red Hat has not been entirely forthcoming with the details of this case. "As to how Red Hat has settled the alleged IP infringement, that's where the transparency (or lack thereof) is my concern. When I asked Red Hat about the patent settlement with Acacia I got the following statement: "Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement. We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas (Civil Action No. 6:09-cv-00097-LED)."" (Thanks to Don Marti)

Comments (15 posted)

Microsoft sues Motorola, citing Android patent infringement (ars technica)

The latest in a series of patent cases involving Android has been launched by Microsoft against Motorola. Ars technica reports: "The patents are all related to key smartphone experiences that include syncing e-mails, calendars, and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications about changes in signal strength and battery power. Microsoft specifically names two Motorola devices, the Droid 2 and the Charm, but says these are just examples and not a comprehensive list."

Florian Mueller has posted his first reaction to the news here.

Comments (180 posted)

Google Answers Oracle (Groklaw)

Groklaw has Google's full response in the Oracle suit, along with the usual commentary. "It's a very aggressive and confident response to Oracle's complaint. Google asks that Oracle's complaint be dismissed, for a judgment in favor of all its counterclaims, for a declaratory judgment that Google has not infringed or contributed to any infringement of any of the patents, a declaration of the invalidity of all the Oracle patents, and a declaration that all Oracle's claims are barred by laches, equitable estoppel and/or waiver, and unclean hands."

Comments (none posted)

Newest Google Android Cell Phone Contains Unexpected 'Feature' (New America)

The New America Foundation has posted a somewhat sensationalist article on the G2 Android phone. "Specifically, one of the microchips embedded into the G2 prevents device owners from making permanent changes that allow custom modifications to the the Android operating system. This is the same Android that purposefully opened up its source code under the Apache License, allowing anyone to use, modify, and redistribute the operating system code even if they choose not to contribute back to the development community." The primary source appears to be this XDA forum; it looks like the G2 has either a mechanism to rewrite the root partition or some sort of union mount that causes post-boot changes to be lost. Either way, it's not a hacker-friendly device.

Comments (25 posted)

Android: Swimming With the Patent Sharks (GigaOM)

Matt Asay discusses the Android patent wars on GigaOM. "So why didn't Google just go along with Sun and take a fee-free license to use Java ME? Because doing so would have required Google to keep its Java implementation consistent with the standard instead of forking it with its Dalvik virtual machine. As much as Google might talk about standards, Google has much to gain by keeping Android applications on the Android platform, rather than allowing them to run on competing platforms like RIM."

Comments (5 posted)

New book: "The Linux Programming Interface"

Linux man-page maintainer Michael Kerrisk's magnum opus The Linux Programming Interface is now available from No Starch Press. The 1500-page book covers Linux system calls and library APIs for system programming, with multiple example programs and diagrams. "It can be difficult and time-consuming to learn how to develop system programs for Linux. It's not unusual for programmers to scour several manuals--or hundreds of web pages--before finding the information they need. According to Michael Kerrisk, ''The Linux Programming Interface' is the book I wanted when I first switched from UNIX to predominantly working in Linux more than a decade ago.' He added that it is '...a broad and deep system programming book that covers Linux-specific details while also clearly delineating standard features available on all UNIX systems. Long before I completed writing this book, it had already become my own primary system programming reference.'"

Full Story (comments: 21)

Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has released "Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript" by Jonathan Stark.

Full Story (comments: none)

JavaScript Patterns and Closure: The Definitive Guide--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly has released "JavaScript Patterns" by Stoyan Stefanov and "Closure: The Definitive Guide" by Michael Bolin.

Full Story (comments: none)

CE Linux Forum Newsletter: September 2010

The CE Linux Forum newsletter for September 2010 covers the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and U-Boot ARM Enhancements.

Full Story (comments: none)

FSFE : Newsletter October 2010

The Free Software Foundation Europe Newsletter for October 2010 is out. "In this edition we discuss the misleading term "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" (FRAND), we explain what we are doing about centralised computer systems and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), and update you on our current campaign to end non-free software commercials by public institutions."

Full Story (comments: none)

Linux Audio Conference 2011

The Linux Audio Conference 2011 will be held May 6-8, 2011 in Ireland. The call for papers will be open until January 15, 2011.

Full Story (comments: none)

FOSDEM 2011 call for talks

FOSDEM 2011 will have a distribution miniconf. "Though it is not yet certain what the details will look like, it is certain that there will be room for distribution-related talks; so this is a call for talk proposals for the distributions rooms at FOSDEM 2011."

Full Story (comments: none)

FOSS.in CFP closing soon

FOSS.in is (in your editor's opinion) the premier free software event in India; this year it is happening from December 15 to 17 in Bangalore. The call for participation is about to close; anybody who would like to be a part of FOSS.in should get their proposals in before October 10.

Comments (none posted)

PyCon 2011 Call For Tutorials

PyCon 2011 will be held March 9th through the 17th, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. The call for tutorial proposals is open until November 1, 2010. "Tutorials are 3-hour long classes (with a refreshment break) taught be some of the leading minds in the Python community. Classes range from beginner (Introduction to Python) to advanced (OOP, Data Storage and Optimization) and everything in between."

Full Story (comments: none)

lca2011 Announces more Keynote Speakers

The linux.conf.au 2011 organizing team has announced two more keynote speakers for lca2011 in Brisbane, Australia. They are Eric Allman, the original author of Sendmail, and Geoff Huston, the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Regional Internet Registry serving the Asia Pacific region.

Full Story (comments: none)

Desktop Summit 2011

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from August 6-12, 2011 in Berlin. "The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects will further foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Moreover, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for main actors to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all."

Full Story (comments: none)

Open Source Health Informatics Conference

The Open Source Health Informatics Conference will be held on October 27, 2010 in London. "The focus of this conference will be around the place that Open Source software should have in UK healthcare and how a coherent community might be established around it. For example would: An NHS version of OpenOffice be a practical proposition?; Could the skillsets that exist within UK healthcare be utilised to create sustainable implementations of Open Source software?; How would the requirements for this be gathered?; Is standardisation via Open Source software a viable aim across the UK healthcare sector?"

Full Story (comments: none)

ON2: Test Signals

ON2: Test Signals is a festival exploring new forms for radio and software. "The festival will bring together software developers and radio practitioners to demonstrate, discuss and develop new ways of applying software to radio on Friday 22 October and Saturday 23 October at Direktorenhaus, Berlin."

Full Story (comments: none)

Events: October 14, 2010 to December 13, 2010

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
October 11 October 15	17th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference	Chicago/Oakbrook Terrace, IL, 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
December 6 December 8	PGDay Europe 2010	Stuttgart, Germany
December 11	Open Source Conference Fukuoka 2010	Fukuoka, Japan

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

Video sessions available from KVM Forum 2010

Videos from the recent KVM Forum are available for viewing.

Comments (none posted)