Announcements

FSF announces new executive director

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the appointment of John Sullivan as its new executive director. "The appointment follows the departure of Peter T. Brown, who has been the Foundation's executive director since 2005. Brown shares his reflections on the change in a blog post at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/peterb."

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Nokia sells its Qt licensing business to Digia

Nokia has announced that it is selling its Qt commercial licensing business to Digia. "We want to emphasize our long-term commitment to Qt. Nokia will drive Qt developments in support of our business needs and our investments in community building, marketing and R&D will continue to benefit all members of the Qt community. By introducing the up-coming open governance model we will also enable other companies, such as Digia, to more easily contribute to Qt, which will enrich Nokia investments in Qt and benefit and grow the Qt community as a whole."

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Novell Reports Financial Results for First Fiscal Quarter 2011

Novell has announced its financial results for the first fiscal quarter of 2011. "For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $191 million. This compares to net revenue of $202 million for the first fiscal quarter of 2010. GAAP income from operations for the first fiscal quarter of 2011 was $12 million. This compares to GAAP income from operations of $21 million for the first fiscal quarter of 2010."

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15 Must-Have Linux Desktop Apps (Datamation)

Matt Hartley looks at 15 desktop applications for the Linux desktop. "Recently it was brought to my attention that all the desktop Linux hoopla in the world doesn't mean squat without compelling applications to get the end user interested. To address this need, I've rounded up fifteen powerful Linux applications that reflect the best that Linux has to offer the desktop user, both in and out of the enterprise environment."

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Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens responds to criticism of Red Hat's decision to ship its RHEL 6 kernel source as one big tarball. "Recently, Jonathan Corbet, respected kernel community member and editor at LWN, commented on our change in kernel RPM packaging. When we released RHEL 6 approximately four months ago, we changed the release of the kernel package to have all our patches pre-applied. Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL. Frankly, our response is to compete."

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Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ)

The Wall Street Journal has posted an article stating that the MPEG LA is under investigation in the US for its attempt to build a patent pool to attack the VP8 codec. "The probe, which pits Google and open-source software advocates against some technology giants like Apple, could help determine whether anyone will own rights over the creation and broadcast of online video in the next major Web programming language, called HTML 5. At stake is 'who is going to have competitive clout in the world after television,' said Eben Moglin [sic], a Columbia University professor who supports free and open software."

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FSFE Newsletter - March 2011

The Free Software Foundation Europe newsletter for March covers Egypt's attempt to shut down the internet, FSFE's legal workshop, and several other topics.

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The Linux Foundation Announces Keynotes for Annual Collaboration Summit

The Linux Foundation has announced the keynotes and the full program for this year's Collaboration Summit. The Summit takes place April 6-8, 2011 in San Francisco, California. "The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is the only event where a cross-section of leaders from the Linux developer, industry and end user communities meet face-to-face to tackle today's most pressing issues facing Linux, including technical development, legal topics, ISV porting and end user requirements. The Summit is an invitation-only event that caters to Linux Foundation members and workgroup contributors. It is designed to accelerate collaboration and problem solving by bringing key stakeholders together in a neutral setting."

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LUGOD presents "Full Scale Flight Simulators"

The Linux Users' Group of Davis (LUGOD) will be holding a meeting on March 21, 2011 with a presentation by John Wojnaroski, Chief Engineer, LFS Technologies, Inc. on "Full Scale Flight Simulators". "LFS Technologies has developed a suite of hardware, electronics, and software that has been integrated with open source projects such as FlightGear flight simulator, JSBSim flight dynamics model, and OpenSceneGraph. The preferred platform is a Linux-based PC with the real-time extensions provided by RTAI/Xenomai."

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PgEast 2011: Session Schedule Up, registration open

PgEast, the PostgreSQL Conference for Developers, End Users and Decision Makers, will take place March 22-25, 2011, in New York City. "This year we will be continuing our trend of covering the entire PostgreSQL ecosystem as well as bringing in some friends from a slightly different world, NoSQL. 10gen, the creators of MongoDB are running a track through the entire three days and also hosting a full day training on their database!"

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PyWeek 12 is registration is open

Registration is open for the 12th Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek), which takes place April 3-10, 2011.

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Events: March 17, 2011 to May 16, 2011

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
May 9 May 11	SambaXP	Göttingen, Germany
May 9 May 10	OpenCms Days 2011 Conference and Expo	Cologne, Germany
May 9 May 13	Linaro Development Summit	Budapest, Hungary
May 9 May 13	Ubuntu Developer Summit	Budapest, Hungary
May 10 May 13	Libre Graphics Meeting	Montreal, Canada
May 10 May 12	Solutions Linux Open Source 2011	Paris, France
May 11 May 14	LinuxTag - International conference on Free Software and Open Source	Berlin, Germany
May 12	NLUUG Spring Conference 2011	ReeHorst, Ede, Netherlands
May 12 May 15	Pingwinaria 2011 - Polish Linux User Group Conference	Spala, Poland
May 12 May 14	Linuxwochen Österreich - Linz	Linz, Austria

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

SCALE Report: SCALE 9X ends on a high note

The SCALE team reports that last month's Southern California Linux Expo had record attendance. ""Because SCALE is the first large Linux and FOSS show in 2011, it serves as an indicator of how the year may go," said Orv Beach, the SCALE 9X publicity co-chair. "From what we've seen this weekend at SCALE, the upcoming months look very bright for FOSS.""

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Video of Mark Pesce's LCA keynote available

The video from Mark Pesce's controversial linux.conf.au keynote has now been posted. The LCA organizers have put a warning and apology at the beginning, but have not otherwise edited the talk.

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