Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
The FSF's hardware endorsement program
The Free Software Foundation has announced an initial set of criteria under which it would endorse hardware as "respecting freedom." "The FSF's criteria seek to cover all aspects of user interaction with and control of a device: they say the hardware must run free software on every layer that is user upgradeable, allow the user to modify that software, support free data formats, be fully usable with free tools, and more."
Open Standards in Europe: FSFE responds to BSA letter
The Free Software Foundation Europe supports open standards and interoperability. Now it seems that the Business Software Alliance is trying to get the European Commission to remove support for open standards. "On Friday FSFE sent a letter to the European Commission to support Open Standards and interoperability. In the drawn-out battle to retain at least a weak recommendation for Open Standards in the revised European Interoperability Framework, FSFE has countered a leaked letter by the lobby group Business Software Alliance with its own thorough analysis of the relation between standards and patents."
FSFE goes after websites that advertise non-free software
The Free Software Foundation Europe notes that "Free Software activists from 41 countries have reported 2286 public sector institutions which advertise non-free PDF readers on their websites. FSFE will now contact these institutions, trying to get as many advertisements for non-free PDF readers as possible removed before the end of the year."
Articles of interest
Kuhn: Canonical, Ltd. Finally On Record: Seeking Open Core
Bradley Kuhn has read this IRC conversation with Mark Shuttleworth and drawn some fairly strong conclusions from it. "Nevertheless, it seems Canonical, Ltd. now believes that they've succeed in their sales job, because they've now confessed their true motive. In an IRC Q&A session last Thursday, Shuttleworth finally admits that his goal is to increase the amount of 'Open Core' activity."
Microsoft Gives its Blessing to OpenOffice.org (Computerworld UK)
Over at Computerworld UK, Glyn Moody compares the (in)famous 1999 Mindcraft study comparing Linux and Windows NT with a recent video that Microsoft has produced. That video shows various folks complaining about OpenOffice.org (and undoubtedly extolling Microsoft Office). "The criticisms made in the video are not really the point - they are mostly about OpenOffice.org not being a 100% clone of Microsoft Office, and compatibility problems with Microsoft's proprietary formats. The key issue is the exactly the same as it was for the Mindcraft benchmarks. You don't compare a rival's product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don't make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor."
Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)
As OpenOffice.org celebrates its ten year anniversary Linux Journal reports that Oracle has renewed its commitment to the project. "As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their commitment to OpenOffice.org. "Oracle's growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community." This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools."
Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)
Ars technica reports that Oracle has asked some TDF (The Document Foundation) founders to resign from the OpenOffice.org community council. "During an OOo community council meeting last week, council chair Louis Saurez-Potts told the TDF members who also sit on the OOo community council that their participation in both organizations constituted a conflict of interest and that their involvement in the new LibreOffice fork should preclude them from holding leadership roles in the OOo community. Saurez-Potts is Oracle's OpenOffice.org community manager, a role that he also held at Sun prior to the acquisition. His position suggests that Oracle views LibreOffice as a hostile fork and will not join TDF as some had hoped."
Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
The Gerson Lehrman Group's site is carrying this missive from Jeff Gould giving a rather wild-eyed analyst view of Oracle's enterprise kernel update. "Linux has been propagandized for years as the next Unix, the 'good' Unix that would leverage the noble democratic principles of open source to avoid the proprietary pitfalls of AIX vs. Solaris vs. HP-UX and all the other now forgotten exemplars of 'bad' vendor-exclusive Unix. But Larry Ellison and the Google kids have served notice that things aren't going to work out that way. Having understood that the GPL open source license that governs Linux is only a fig leaf, they've discovered that there is nothing to prevent them from rolling their own de facto private versions of Linux while still respecting the letter of the open source law."
Level Up to IPv6 with Ubuntu 10.10 on Comcast (Linux.com)
Linux.com has a tutorial on how to participate in the IPv6 trial being run by Comcast, a major US ISP. "In phase one of their trials they are relying on the tunneling mechanisms 6to4 and more recently 6RD (Rapid Deployment). Comcast has 'open sourced' its solution based on OpenWRT if you happen to have a router supported by OpenWRT. I do not, so like any self-respecting Linux geek, I set out to do it with a Linux box. I found the documentation for doing so difficult to find."
New Books
Hadoop: The Definitive Guide--New from O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media has released "Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition" by Tom White.Making Software--New from O'Reilly Media
O'Reilly Media has released "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It" edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson."PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance" book now available
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance" by Greg Smith is available from Packt Publishing.
Calls for Presentations
Announcing EuroBSDCon 2011
The call for proposals is open for EuroBSDCon 2011. "The EuroBSDCon 2011 conference will be held in the Netherlands from Thursday 6 October 2011 to Sunday 9 October 2011, with tutorials on Thursday and Friday and talks on Saturday and Sunday."
Upcoming Events
Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election
Elections for the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board will be held at the joint Kernel Summit/Linux Plumbers Conference reception on November 2. There are five seats to be filled, and, as of this writing, only two candidates. Interested candidates need not be at the election to run, but they do need to put their nomination in; see the announcement for details.lca2011 registration now open, one week left for Miniconf CFPs
Two pieces of news from linux.conf.au 2011, which will be held January 24-29 in Brisbane, Australia. Registration is now open for the conference, with early bird rates lasting until November 8th or when they are all sold out. Also, there is only one week left to submit papers for the Miniconfs. "lca2011 is really shaping up to be another linux.conf.au to remember. From the new innovative Rocketry miniconf to our impressive Keynotes and the strong but broad range of relevant presentations, there is something for everyone. There are technical sessions for those who really want to delve into the deeper areas of linux and open source software, and there is also the less technical presentations for the end users."
MAGNet Conference
The Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers (MAGNet) Conference will be held on May 6-7, 2011 in St. Louis, Missouri. "The main focus of the event will be education on everything from Linux on the desktop to Open Source philosophy to business applications. Linux for the artistic, software and hardware, security and networking will also be covered; plus a bit of everything in between. Everyone from the simply curious to the seasoned technology professional will find something of interest at MAGNet Con."
Events: October 28, 2010 to December 27, 2010
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| October 25 October 29 |
Ubuntu Developer Summit | Orlando, Florida, USA |
| 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 |
| December 13 December 18 |
SciPy.in 2010 | Hyderabad, India |
| December 15 December 17 |
FOSS.IN/2010 | Bangalore, India |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol