Announcements
Non-Commercial announcements
CELF is joining the Linux Foundation
At the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Tim Bird, architecture chair of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), announced that the organization was joining the Linux Foundation. Bird said that CELF "couldn't be more happy to have the opportunity" to work within the LF. Jim Zemlin, LF executive director, congratulated both organizations and mentioned that the LF would be doubling the funding that CELF currently puts into promoting embedded Linux. He also said that there would be some more information about the new Yocto project—an effort to standardize the embedded Linux development environment—later in the conference.
Update: The Linux Foundation press release about the merger is available as well.
2011 Fedora Scholarship open to applications
The Fedora Scholarship program is accepting applicants from students who will be entering college in Fall 2011. "The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes one high school senior per year for contributions to the Fedora Project and free software/content in general. The scholarship is a $2,000 USD reward per year over each of the four years the recipient is in college, which is funded by Red Hat's Community Architecture team, as well as travel and lodging to the nearest FUDCon for each year of the scholarship."
Articles of interest
Nokia boosts Qt commitment, changes Symbian strategy (ars technica)
Ars technica reports on some changes to Nokia's mobile platform strategy. It plans to do more rapid and incremental Symbian releases, while making Qt the "sole focus" of its application development. "Nokia's plan to use Qt for all of its own applications is also significant. It will enable richer user interfaces and more consistency between Symbian and MeeGo. It also sends a strong message to third-party developers that Qt is ready for prime time on Nokia devices. The recent Qt 4.7 release brings some extremely compelling new functionality for building modern touch-friendly mobile software. Taking advantage of these capabilities will make the Symbian user experience better and help ameliorate some of the issues that detract from Symbian's competitiveness. During my recent tests of the N8, I often found myself thinking that the whole experience would be better if Qt was used pervasively in the bundled applications."
How Qt could bring better third-party software to Ubuntu (ars technica)
Ars technica looks at the advantages of the Qt toolkit. "A point that I think often gets overlooked in the toolkit debate is that adopting Qt doesn't necessarily imply ditching GNOME or switching to KDE. As we discussed in our review of Qt 4.5 last year, Qt has relatively robust support for Gtk+ theming, including conformity with the GNOME HIG and support for native GNOME dialogs. When everything is properly configured, Qt applications look entirely at home in GNOME environments. Adding a standard Qt library stack to a fresh Ubuntu installation requires only 16.5MB of packages, which expands to approximately 50MB on disk."
FSFE interview with Leena Simon
The Free Software Foundation Europe has posted an interview with Leena Simon. "I am fighting within The Pirate Party, as well as in the Freedom not Fear movement, for Free Software. In both movements a lot of people haven't understood yet how important Free Software is: FS does not really connect the one with the other. They are connected in different ways and I can also understand their critique about Free Software."
OpenOffice.org Council members resign (The H)
The H reports that Christoph Noack, Florian Effenberger and Thorsten Behrens have resigned from the OpenOffice.org community council. "Noack says in his email that his "idea of a stable and working open-source environment differs from what I currently perceive when we talk about certain community structure characteristics." Effenberger notes that he feels it's unfortunate that some people view OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice as separate and conflicting projects and that he hopes there will be a resolution in the future."
License compliance is not a problem for open source users (opensource.com)
Simon Phipps worries that excessive focus on license compliance actions obscures the fact that free software licenses make life easy for users. "Open source does not place a compliance burden on the end user, does not mandate acceptance of an end-user license agreement, does not subject you to para-police action from the BSA. That is a significant advantage, and there's no wonder that proprietary vendors want to hide it from you and make you think open source licensing is somehow complex, burdensome or risky. If all you want to do is use the software - which is all you are allowed to do with proprietary software as the other three freedoms are entirely absent - then open source software carries significantly less risk."
Legal Announcements
Gemalto sues Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung
The mobile patent thicket grows thicker: a company called Gemalto has announced the filing of a lawsuit against Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, claiming that Android violates its patents 6,308,317, 7,117,485, and 7,818,727. The latter two were just issued in October; all seem to cover the revolutionary concept of running an interpreted language on a microcontroller.
New Books
Land of Lisp--New from No Starch Press
No Starch Press has released "Land of Lisp", a "Unique, Cartoon-Filled Guide Makes Lisp Programming Fun", by Conrad Barski.
MAKE Magazine Launches Do-It-Yourself Space Technology in New Issue
MAKE Magazine Volume 24 from O'Reilly Media is available.
Resources
Linux Foundation Monthly Newsletter: October 2010
The October issue of the Linux Foundation newsletter covers the Linux Foundation User Survey; New Open Compliance Resources Available; Linux Kernel Summit & Plumbers Conferences Are Coming Up; Aava Mobile, Insprit and OpenLogic Join The Linux Foundation; the Linux Foundation in the News; and Upcoming Training Opportunities.
Contests and Awards
EFF: Pioneer Awards
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has announced the four winners of its 2010 Pioneer Awards. The winners are Pamela Jones and Groklaw, Steven Aftergood, James Boyle, and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru. "When Pamela Jones created Groklaw in 2003, she envisioned a new kind of participatory journalism and distributed discovery -- a place where programmers and engineers could educate lawyers on technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free and Open Source community, and where technologists could learn about how the legal system works. Groklaw quickly became an essential resource for understanding such important legal debates as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the European Union antitrust case against Microsoft, and whether software should qualify for patent protection."
Education and Certification
Free Technology Academy partners with the FSF
The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have announced their partnership in the FTA's Associate Partner Network. "The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of Free Software and free standards."
Upcoming Events
lca2011 - Announces Vint Cerf as a Keynote Speaker
The linux.conf.au 2011 organizing team has announced that Vinton G. Cerf will be a keynote speaker for lca2011. "Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world."
Events: November 4, 2010 to January 3, 2011
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 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