Announcements
Brief items
The Ada Initiative launches
The Ada Initiative - an organization intended to promote women in open technology and culture - has announced its existence. "The Ada Initiative will concentrate on focused, direct action programs, including recruitment and training for women, education for community members, and working with companies and projects to improve their outreach to women." The Initiative is the work of longtime community members Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner.
Mandriva Joins Open Invention Network as a Licensee
Mandriva has joined OIN. "Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to enable and protect Linux, today extended its community with the signing of Mandriva as a licensee. By becoming a licensee, Mandriva has joined the growing list of organizations that recognize the importance of leveraging the Open Invention Network to further spur open source innovation."
Articles of interest
Sony lawyers now targeting anyone who posts PlayStation 3 hack (ars technica)
Ars technica covers Sony's escalating lawsuits over the PS3 hacks. "Sony is also trying to haul the so-called "failOverflow hacking team" into court. But first, Sony needs to learn the identities and whereabouts of the group's members. They are accused of posting a rudimentary hack in December. It was refined by Hotz weeks later when he accessed the console's so-called "metldr keys," or root keys that trick the system into running unauthorized programs."
Hemel: Long-term Management
Adriaan de Groot has posted a message from Armijn Hemel on his blog about considering what might happen to your free software (or other) project after you are gone. It's "a post that can easily ruin your mood", but one worth thinking about. "
The common theme is that these people were very passionate about what they did. They truly loved their work and it work was appreciated by many. But when fate struck it turned out that they had not taken care of what would happen after they would pass away. I am very sure that they didn't expect this to happen so soon, or never realized that this could be an issue. But in the digital world, with lapsing domain name registrations, databases and webspace being deleted because of unpaid bills, offline development trees and uninformed heirs this is becoming more and more of a risk."
Open hardware can yield dividends (ITWire)
Sam Varghese talks with Jonathan Oxer about open hardware. ""This is where one of the interesting differences between open hardware and open software come in - with open software it's quite easy to publish the source code and the whole tool chain, like compilers or whatever else is necessary. You can give everybody, at zero cost essentially, everything they need to reproduce your work and to develop and build on it. With open hardware it's quite different. I can give someone the design parts for a project but then they need the actual materials or the tools and resources to reproduce it in order to improve on it or collaborate with me.""
Review: Hands on LibreOffice 3.3 (Linux.com)
Linux.com has a review of LibreOffice. "The remainder of LibreOffice Writer's new features were also useful. I liked the page numbering tool, and I really appreciated the new Print dialog box (which is present in all of the LibreOffice tools). I know, it's a little odd to get excited about a dialog box, but I always have found the OpenOffice.org Print dialog box rather clunky, so it's LibreOffice counterpart is a breath of fresh air."
A possible game changer for invalidating bad software patents (Opensource.com)
Red Hat's VP and assistant general counsel Rob Tiller writes about the amicus brief filed with the US Supreme Court by Red Hat and a diverse group of other companies in the Microsoft v. i4i case. "Once a patent is inappropriately granted, it is possible, in theory, for a party accused of infringing it to show that it is invalid. In practice, this is quite difficult. When software patents are at issue, the technical issues are often complicated and difficult for a lay jury to understand. Jurors frequently mistakenly assume that the patent examination process was careful and exhaustive, and so have a tendency to assume that a patent must be valid. On top of all this potential confusion, jurors are instructed under current rules that they may only invalidate a patent if they find the evidence for invalidity clear and convincing. Even when there's strong evidence that a patent should never have been granted, it's difficult for lay juries to conclude that the technical issues are clear."
Nokia drops MeeGo phone before launch (Reuters)
Reuters has a vague report saying that Nokia is dropping MeeGo. "In a leaked internal memo, Chief Executive Stephen Elop wrote: 'We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.'"
Update: the full memo has been posted on Engadget; what Nokia will do is far from clear at this point.
New Books
Using JRuby--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has released "Using JRuby", by Charles O Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Nick Sieger, Ola Bini and Ian Dees.
Contests and Awards
2010 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award Winners
The winners of the LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards have been announced. "Ubuntu, Android, MySQL, Cassandra, VLC, Puppet and Django are among the winners."
Calls for Presentations
Linux Australia seeks 2013 conference hosts (builder.au)
John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has announced that applications are open for hosting linux.conf.au 2013. Formal submissions will be accepted until May 15, 2011. The winner will be announced at the close of linux.conf.au 2012, which will be hosted at Ballarat University in Victoria.Camp KDE 2011
The 3rd annual Camp KDE has been announced. This year's Camp KDE will take place in San Francisco, California on April 4-5, 2011, preceding the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. Registration is open and proposals for talks will be accepted until March 2, 2011.
Upcoming Events
Bacon: Community Leadership Summit 2011 Announced!
Jono Bacon has announced this year's Community Leadership Summit on his blog. It will be held the weekend before OSCON, July 23-24, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. "For those of you who are unfamiliar with the CLS, it is an entirely free event designed to bring together community leaders and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event provides an unconference style schedule in which attendees can discuss, debate and explore topics. This is augmented with a range of scheduled talks, panel discussions, networking opportunities and more."
conf.kde.in Announces Talks, Keynotes and Registration
Three keynote speakers have been announced for conf.kde.in, along with a list of talks and presentations. Early bird registration ends February 25. conf.kde.in will be held in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India, March 9-13, 2011.FSFE: Celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) will be celebrating Document Freedom Day (DFD) on March 30, 2011. "DFD is a global day to celebrate Open Standards and open document formats and its importance. Open Standards ensure the freedom to access your data, and the freedom to build Free Software to write and read data in specific formats."
PyCon 2011 - Announcing "Startup Stories"
PyCon 2011 (March 9-17, 2011 in Atlanta, GA) will be featuring some "startup stories". "These are the stories of companies that have built and shipped (or, in the case of Threadless - about to ship) Python systems at scale. Or, in the case of Open Stack - it is the story of the next generation "Open Cloud" platform for Python at scale."
PyCon Australia 2011
The second PyCon Australia will be held August 20-21, 2011 in Sydney. "International guests should note that Kiwi PyCon is to run on the following weekend, making it a great opportunity to attend a couple of awesome Down Under conferences and hopefully do some sprinting with the locals."
Python Game Programming Challenge 12
The 12th Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek) starts April 3, 2011. Entrants have one week to write a game from scratch either as an individual or as a team.All about IPv6 At SCALE 9X
SCALE will have a couple of talks on getting ready for IPv6. "Most people in the tech industry know that the IPv4 address space will run dry over the next few months. The forced march to IPv6, with all of its potential downsides -- including network slowdowns and downright outages -- has only just begun. Has your organization started the move? If not, consider attending SCALE!" The 9th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 9X) will be held February 25-27, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA.
Events: February 17, 2011 to April 18, 2011
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| February 25 | Build an Open Source Cloud | Los Angeles, CA, USA |
| February 25 February 27 |
Southern California Linux Expo | Los Angeles, CA, USA |
| February 25 | Ubucon | Los Angeles, CA, USA |
| February 26 | Open Source Software in Education | Los Angeles, CA, USA |
| March 1 March 2 |
Linux Foundation End User Summit 2011 | Jersey City, NJ, USA |
| March 5 | Open Source Days 2011 Community Edition | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| March 7 March 10 |
Drupalcon Chicago | Chicago, IL, USA |
| March 9 March 11 |
ConFoo Conference | Montreal, Canada |
| March 9 March 11 |
conf.kde.in 2011 | Bangalore, India |
| March 11 March 13 |
PyCon 2011 | Atlanta, Georgia, USA |
| March 19 | Open Source Conference Oita 2011 | Oita, Japan |
| March 19 March 20 |
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage | Chemnitz, Germany |
| March 19 | OpenStreetMap Foundation Japan Mappers Symposium | Tokyo, Japan |
| March 21 March 22 |
Embedded Technology Conference 2011 | San Jose, Costa Rica |
| March 22 March 24 |
OMG Workshop on Real-time, Embedded and Enterprise-Scale Time-Critical Systems | Washington, DC, USA |
| March 22 March 25 |
Frühjahrsfachgespräch | Weimar, Germany |
| March 22 March 24 |
UKUUG Spring 2011 Conference | Leeds, UK |
| March 22 March 25 |
PgEast PostgreSQL Conference | New York City, NY, USA |
| March 23 March 25 |
Palmetto Open Source Software Conference | Columbia, SC, USA |
| March 26 | 10. Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2011 | Augsburg, Germany |
| March 28 April 1 |
GNOME 3.0 Bangalore Hackfest | GNOME.ASIA SUMMIT 2011 | Bangalore, India |
| March 28 | Perth Linux User Group Quiz Night | Perth, Australia |
| March 29 March 30 |
NASA Open Source Summit | Mountain View, CA, USA |
| April 1 April 3 |
Flourish Conference 2011! | Chicago, IL, USA |
| April 2 April 3 |
Workshop on GCC Research Opportunities | Chamonix, France |
| April 2 | Texas Linux Fest 2011 | Austin, Texas, USA |
| April 4 April 5 |
Camp KDE 2011 | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 4 April 6 |
SugarCon 11 | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 4 April 6 |
Selenium Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 6 April 8 |
5th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 8 April 9 |
Hack'n Rio | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |
| April 9 | Linuxwochen Österreich - Graz | Graz, Austria |
| April 9 | Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre | |
| April 11 April 14 |
O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 11 April 13 |
2011 Embedded Linux Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 13 April 14 |
2011 Android Builders Summit | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 16 | Open Source Conference Kansai/Kobe 2011 | Kobe, Japan |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol