Announcements
Brief items
Google "Chromebooks" launch
Google has announced the forthcoming commercial availability of "Chromebook" systems built on ChromeOS. "These are not typical notebooks. With a Chromebook you won't wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You'll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files. Chromebooks will last a day of use on a single charge, so you don't need to carry a power cord everywhere. And with optional 3G, just like your phone, you'll have the web when you need it. Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain. Even more importantly, you won't spend hours fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date." These systems have Linux inside, of course, though one would be hard put to tell from the announcement; LWN reviewed a ChromeOS system in January.
HP: 10 Reasons for Geeks to Love HP webOS
HP has posted a page promoting WebOS for developers. "We have an awesome independent developer community in webOS Internals that does things like replacement kernels, new system services, and overclocking tools. Our community produces innovations that have made their way into later webOS releases; for example, we liked the page cache compression work that they did to improve webOS 1.4.5 so much that we made it part of our standard Linux kernels on webOS 2.0. HP hasn't tried to stop or silence these groups; instead we work with them when possible and even give them hardware to help with their explorations."
Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0
Pamela Jones has used her last full-time day at Groklaw to announce that Mark Webbink will be running the show from here. "Now that the battlefield has shifted from SCO attacking Linux to Microsoft using patents against it and from servers to mobiles, I realized that Groklaw needs a lawyer at the helm. So I asked Mark Webbink if he would take on this role, and I'm thrilled to tell you that he has accepted. He is the new editor of Groklaw as of today. Mark was General Counsel at Red Hat, as you know, and he is on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is also a law professor, which as I'll explain is a vital piece of what he has planned. Mark is a visiting professor at New York Law School where he runs the Center for Patent Innovations, oversees the Peer To Patent project run with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has been active in seeking reform of the U.S. patent system, and teaches patent licensing."
Announcements from Libre Graphics Meeting
The 6th Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 was held May 10-13, in Montreal. During the meeting the company Fabricatorz helped launch new releases of the Open Clip Art Library and the Open Font Library. They also demonstrated the Milkymist One video synthesizer.
Articles of interest
Some Observations on Oracle v. Google (Groklaw)
Groklaw has an article by Mark Webbink (law professor, former Red Hat general counsel). "So if you are going to develop a new implementation of something like the Java run-time environment, you have to not only use a clean room in order to avoid copyright claims, you also have to work around any relevant patents (and this doesn't require a clean room). Suffice it to say that the approach Google has taken has some potential holes in it with respect to patents."
How Yahoo won the Bedrock patent trial that Google lost (Thomson Reuters)
Google was not the only company sued for patent infringement by Bedrock; there several other defendants, including Yahoo. Most of those defendants have settled, but Yahoo stuck it out to the end and got a "not infringing" verdict for its pain. Thomson Reuters looks at what happened differently this time to enable Yahoo to win. "First off, Bedrock had a stronger case against Google. [Bedrock counsel Douglas] Cawley put on evidence that Google used Bedrock's Linux code on its servers (although Google got rid of the code before trial). Yahoo, on the other hand, used a different form of Linux, and its lead trial lawyer, Yar Chaikovsky and Fay Morisseau of McDermott Will, were able to argue that Yahoo never executed the Bedrock code."
Groklaw - "The blog that made a difference"
The H talks with Pamela "PJ" Jones about her work on Groklaw. "I could never have done Groklaw without all those volunteers who helped me carry the burdens and shared the fun. People show up with skills and because they have those skills and you don't, you'd never think to try what they propose, but when they show you, it's wonderful. That's how we started doing charts of legal documents, comparing versions of a complaint and highlighting the changes or doing one of a complaint and an answer or two opposing memorandums of law. You can see in a glance what matters, what changed, what is at issue, with color coding."
Education and Certification
LPI Announces New Training Partners in China and Philippines
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced new LPI-Approved Training Partners in the region: Beijing Shenghao Boyuan Technology Company of mainland China and Concentrix of the Philippines.
Calls for Presentations
COSCUP 2011 Call For Proposals
The Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters (COSCUP) will be held August 20-21, 2011, in Taipei, Taiwan. The call for proposals is open until June 17. "COSCUP is the largest annual FLOSS conference organized by local communities in Taiwan. The conference has sessions for new users, enthusiastic promoters, coders or anyone who is interested in cutting-edge FLOSS technologies. The goal is to create a friendly and informative environment for people from different communities to make friends, learn new technologies and inspire each other."
openSUSE Conference 2011 CfP open!
This year's openSUSE Conference will take place September 11-14, in Nuremberg, Germany. The call for proposals is open untul July 11. "The committee is looking for a wide range of talks and sessions from Free Software contributors, however openSUSE related topics are obviously our focus. To simplify the wide range of activities one could plan, we have created three different sessions following the Read/Write/Execute theme. For Read-Only there are talks with the traditional slides and 5-10 minutes Q&A at the end. For Write there are the BOF sessions where discussions can take place. Finally, in Workshops the Execute bit can be set!"
Upcoming Events
Events: May 26, 2011 to July 25, 2011
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| June 1 June 3 |
Workshop Python for High Performance and Scientific Computing | Tsukuba, Japan |
| June 1 | Informal meeting at IRILL on weaknesses of scripting languages | Paris, France |
| June 1 June 3 |
LinuxCon Japan 2011 | Yokohama, Japan |
| June 3 June 5 |
Open Help Conference | Cincinnati, OH, USA |
| June 6 June 10 |
DjangoCon Europe | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| June 10 June 12 |
Southeast LinuxFest | Spartanburg, SC, USA |
| June 13 June 15 |
Linux Symposium'2011 | Ottawa, Canada |
| June 15 June 17 |
2011 USENIX Annual Technical Conference | Portland, OR, USA |
| June 20 June 26 |
EuroPython 2011 | Florence, Italy |
| June 21 June 24 |
Open Source Bridge | Portland, OR, USA |
| June 27 June 29 |
YAPC::NA | Asheville, NC, USA |
| June 29 July 2 |
12º Fórum Internacional Software Livre | Porto Alegre, Brazil |
| June 29 | Scilab conference 2011 | Palaiseau, France |
| July 9 July 14 |
Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre | Strasbourg, France |
| July 11 July 16 |
SciPy 2011 | Austin, TX, USA |
| July 11 July 12 |
PostgreSQL Clustering, High Availability and Replication | Cambridge, UK |
| July 11 July 15 |
Ubuntu Developer Week | online event |
| July 15 July 17 |
State of the Map Europe 2011 | Wien, Austria |
| July 17 July 23 |
DebCamp | Banja Luka, Bosnia |
| July 19 | Getting Started with C++ Unit Testing in Linux | |
| July 24 July 30 |
DebConf11 | Banja Luka, Bosnia |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol