Announcements

The Ada Initiative Announces Advisory Board

The Ada Initiative, which is "a non-profit promoting women in open technology and culture" (and was the subject of an article in last week's LWN), has announced its advisory board. Those advisors are: Donna Benjamin, Alice Boxhall, Rachel Chalmers, Francesca Coppa, Selena Deckelmann, Sue Gardner, Leigh Honeywell, Danielle Madeley, Denise Paolucci, Kirrily Robert, Nóirín Shirley, and Matt Zimmerman. More information about the advisors can be found in the press release and on the advisors web page. "The advisory board will work closely with the Ada Initiative founders in planning and executing their projects."

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The Document Foundation achieves its fundraising goal

The Document Foundation has announced that its fundraising drive has been entirely successful. "The Community around LibreOffice, the free personal productivity suite, has accomplished the next major milestone in establishing The Document Foundation as a legal entity. In just eight days, some 2,000 donors from all over the world contributed €50,000 for the capital stock necessary to set-up the legal entity in Germany."

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MeeBlip synthesizer in the wild

CreateDigitalMusic (CDM) looks at MeeBlip, an "open source, hackable synthesizer" that was co-produced by James Grahame of Reflex Audio and CDM. The hardware and software were both released under open source licenses, and the video-heavy review covers building MeeBlips from scratch or kits, manufacturing the MeeBlip, as well as people experimenting with the device. "But the next big improvement could come from you. Next on our plate is making it easier to use the open source software part of the MeeBlip, by providing tutorials for how to make firmware modifications yourself. [...] Of course, modding the MeeBlip isn't at all essential to enjoying the thing. I'm equally excited about those features as I am the way in which people use the MeeBlip in their music."

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Yocto project and OpenEmbedded align

The Linux Foundation has announced that the Yocto project will "align" with OpenEmbedded to advance embedded Linux. In addition, new companies have pledged support for Yocto/OpenEmbedded, and the list of contributing companies now includes Cavium Networks, Dell, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, LSI, Mentor Graphics, Mindspeed, MontaVista Software, NetLogic Microsystems, RidgeRun, Texas Instruments, Tilera, Timesys, and Wind River, among others. "The Yocto Project is merging technology with the OpenEmbedded community and extending governance to include OpenEmbedded representatives. In addition, the projects are planning to share a common OpenEmbedded Core consisting of software build recipes and core Linux components, preventing fragmentation and reinforcing the OpenEmbedded methodology as an open standard for embedded Linux build systems."

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DoD and Open Source Software

The DACS Software Tech News Volume 14, Number 1 has articles on the relationship of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and OSS. David A. Wheeler wrote or co-wrote several of the articles and takes note of some interesting points in his weblog. Some articles are available in HTML but registration is required to download the entire issue in PDF format.

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Sony's War on Makers, Hackers, and Innovators (Make)

Make has put together a lengthy summary of Sony's actions against those who would do interesting things with its hardware. It ends with a plea to the company to adopt a friendlier attitude toward its customers. "One of the worst things a company can do is upset people whose hobby is installing Linux on things. Sony's removal of this feature brought dozens of teams around the world together, and we were all re-introduced to 'GeoHot' (George Hotz). GeoHot was best known for jailbreaking the iPhone, allowing owners to use different carriers as well as put their own software on their own devices. Jailbreaking of phones is perfectly legal in the U.S. now, and we're guessing it will eventually be fine for other devices too."

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Open source expert takes on the hardest job at Microsoft (Network World)

Network World talks with Gianugo Rabellino, director of open source communities at Microsoft. ""My role is to make sure that open source communities have a go-to person to talk to when it comes to having conversations with Microsoft," Rabellino explains. Within Microsoft, Rabellino is also there for internal product groups who want to engage with proponents of free and open source software. "My hope is that I may be able to bring the conversation to the next level.""

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U.K. Comes out for Royalty-Free Standards for Government Procurement (The Standards Blog)

Andy Updegrove looks at a recent U.K. decision about "open standards". "The U.K. has become the latest country to conclude that for information and communications technology (ICT) procurement purposes, "open standards" means "royalty free standards." While apparently falling short of a legal requirement, a Cabinet Office Procurement Policy Note recommends that all departments, agencies, non-departmental bodies and "any other bodies for which they are responsible" should specify open standards in their procurement activities, unless there are "clear business reasons why this is inappropriate.""

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Implementing Open Standards in Open Source (Software Tech News)

Lawrence Rosen has a lengthy article about the difficulties of implementing "open standards" as open source in the presence of patent problems; he concludes with a discussion of the Open Web Foundation's patent grant agreement. "It is not yet known whether the OWF provisions for patent licensing will overcome the resistance to change for IP policies in standards organizations in order to make both copyrights and patents freely available to open source implementers of open standards. Nor is it known what effect the Oracle v. Google lawsuit will have on the Java standards and the future expectations of implementers to be free to create software based on open standards. Intellectual property attorneys live in interesting times."

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Tom's Definitive Linux Software Roundup: Audio Production (Tom's Hardware)

Tom's Hardware takes a look at Linux applications for audio production. "This segment of Tom's Definitive Linux Application Roundup is a little different than the previous installments because it contains apps that require a good amount of audio production knowledge to use. While some of these applications are highly technical, the required knowledge is in the realm of audio production, and not Linux. In other words, readers looking into audio production using Linux are expected to have a certain level of audio know-how. But as a result of our strict standards for featured applications, little, if any, Linux experience is needed."

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The Book of Audacity--New from No Starch Press

No Starch Press has released "The Book of Audacity", by Carla Schroder.

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Programming Amazon EC2--New from O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media has released "Programming Amazon EC2", by Jurg van Vliet and Flavia Paganelli.

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Desktop Summit CFP announced and Registration open

The CFP for the Desktop Summit, which is a joint GNOME and KDE conference to be held August 6-12 in Berlin, Germany, is now open. Abstracts for presentations are due by March 25. Registration for the conference is open now as well. "Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC and Akademy are the world's largest gatherings of those involved with the free desktop or mobile user interfaces. Developers, artists, translators, community organisers, users, and representatives from government, education, and businesses and anyone else who shares an interest are welcome. GNOME and KDE are Free Software communities that drive the user interfaces of many Linux-powered devices, ranging from smartphones to laptops, or personal media centers. This year, for the second time, both communities have decided to organise a single, joint conference. We anticipate over a thousand participants, covering both projects as well as related technologies."

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2011 Linux Symposium Call for Participation

The Call for Participation is open for the 2011 Linux Symposium, which will be held June 13-15 in Ottawa, Canada. "We are seeking submissions for Summits, Paper Presentations, Tutorials, Panel Discussions, Lightning Talks, and Bird of a Feather Sessions." The proposal deadline is March 15.

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13th Real Time Linux Workshop - 1st Call for Papers

The 13th Real-Time Linux Workshop will be held October 20-22, 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. "Authors from academics, industry as well as the user community are invited to submit papers on original work related to Open Source real-time systems. Such work may deal with general topics related to Open Source based real-time systems but also with research, experiments and case studies, as well as with issues of integration of Open Source real-time and embedded systems. A special focus will be on industrial case studies and safety-related systems." The deadline for abstract submission is June 13, 2011.

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LibreOffice conference announced for October 12-15

The first LibreOffice conference will be held October 12 to 15 in Paris. "Carrying on the tradition of previous OOoCon conferences, the LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally."

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Events: March 10, 2011 to May 9, 2011

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
April 25 April 26	WebKit Contributors Meeting	Cupertino, USA
April 26 April 29	OpenStack Conference and Design Summit	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 28 April 29	Puppet Camp EU 2011: Amsterdam	Amsterdam, Netherlands
April 29	Ottawa IPv6 Summit 2011	Ottawa, Canada
April 29 April 30	Professional IT Community Conference 2011	New Brunswick, NJ, USA
April 30 May 1	LinuxFest Northwest	Bellingham, Washington, USA
May 3 May 6	Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2011	Boston, MA, USA
May 4 May 5	ASoC and Embedded ALSA Conference	Edinburgh, United Kingdom
May 5 May 7	Linuxwochen Österreich - Wien	Wien, Austria
May 6 May 8	Linux Audio Conference 2011	Maynooth, Ireland

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

Allison: Geek Time with Jim Zemlin

Jeremy Allison has a video interview with Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "In addition to talking about the future, Jim shares insights on the history and significance of Linux."

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