Announcements

Open Virtualization Alliance

The recently announced Open Virtualization Alliance is "a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)." The founding companies include BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and SUSE. "The Open Virtualization Alliance will provide education, best practices and technical advice to help businesses understand and evaluate their virtualization options. The consortium complements the existing open source communities managing the development of the KVM hypervisor and associated management capabilities, which are rapidly driving technology innovations for customers virtualizing both Linux and Windows applications." (Thanks to Romain Francoise)

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TDF announces the Engineering Steering Committee

The Document Foundation has announced the members of its Engineering Steering Committee. "The 10 members of the ESC are Andras Timar (localization), Michael Meeks and Petr Mladek of Novell, Caolan McNamara and David Tardon of RedHat, Bjoern Michaelsen of Canonical, Michael Natterer of Lanedo, Rene Engelhard of Debian, and the independent contributors Norbert Thiebaud and Rainer Bielefeld (QA). The ESC convenes once a week by telephone to discuss the progress of the time-based release schedule and coordinate development activities. Their meetings routinely include other active, interested developers and topic experts."

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The Humble Homebrew Collection

The latest in the Humble games series is the Humble Homebrew Collection. All games in this collection are released under the MIT license and will run on a jailbroken PS3, Linux, Windows, Mac or Android. "The main purpose of this website it to serve as a petition against Sony's unjust behavior towards their customers. You are encouraged to sign the petition, donate to the developers or you can simply download the games. The choice is yours. If you wish to do so, you may also donate to the developers of this homebrew application, as well as to the EFF, which helps defend our rights in this digital age."

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Mozilla rejects WebP image format, Google adds it to Picasa (ars technica)

Ars technica looks at WebP adoption. "Building mainstream support for a new media format is challenging, especially when the advantages are ambiguous. WebM was attractive to some browser vendors because its royalty-free license arguably solved a real-world problem. According to critics, the advantages of WebP are illusory and don't offer sufficient advantages over JPEG to justify adoption of the new format. Aside from Google—which introduced official support for WebP in Chrome 12—Opera is the only other browser that natively supports the format. Despite the ease with which it can be supported, other browser vendors are reluctant to endorse the format and make it a permanent part of the Web landscape."

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Aslett: Opening up the Open Source Initiative

The 451 Group's Matthew Aslett has posted a writeup of the plans to reform the Open Source Initiative as discussed at the Open Source Business Conference. "Arguably, a fate equal to the subversion of the OSI would be irrelevance. Rather than assuming that organisations will seek to over-run the OSI, I believe more attention should be being placed on ensuring that organisations will seek to join. The OSI remains well-respected, but I believe that for many of the different constituencies in the open source community it is not entirely clear what it is that the OSI contributes beyond its traditional role of protecting the Open Source Definition and approving associated licenses."

Comments (7 posted)

A Liberating Betrayal? (ComputerWorld)

Simon Phipps discusses the end of Skype support for Asterisk in this ComputerWorld UK column. "The proprietary interests hold all the cards here. The community can't just 'rehost and carry on' because the crucial add-on is proprietary. Even if wasn't, the protocol it's implementing is proprietary and subject to arbitrary change - very likely to happen if anyone attempts to reverse-engineer the interface and protocol. Asterisk may be open source, but if you're dependent on this interface to connect with your customers on Skype you've no freedoms - that's the way 'open core' works."

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FSFE: Fellowship interview with Florian Effenberger

The Free Software Foundation Europe has an interview with Florian Effenberger. "Florian Effenberger has been a Free Software evangelist for many years. Pro bono, he is founding member and part of the Steering Committee at The Document Foundation. He has previously been active in the OpenOffice.org project for seven years, most recently as Marketing Project Lead. Florian has ten years' experience in designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on Free Software. He is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as Free Software, Open Standards and legal matters."

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Kuhn: Clarification on Android, its (Lack of) Copyleft-ness, and GPL Enforcement

Bradley M. Kuhn shares some thoughts about claims that Android code violates the GPL or LGPL. "Of course, as a software freedom advocate, I'm deeply dismayed that Google, Motorola and others haven't seen fit to share a lot of the Android code in a meaningful way with the community; failure to share software is an affront to what the software freedom movement seeks to accomplish. However, every reliable report that I've seen indicates that there are no GPL nor LGPL violations present." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

Comments (34 posted)

New Zenoss Core Book Available

Packt Publishing has released "Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring", by Michael Badger.

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PyCon DE 2011 - Call for Papers

PyCon DE will be held in Leipzig, Germany October 4-9, 2011. The conference language is German, so the call for papers (click below) is also in German.

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Desktop Summit 2011 conference program announced

The program for the 2011 Desktop Summit has been announced. The conference, which combines GNOME's GUADEC and KDE's Akademy, will be held in Berlin, Germany, August 6-12. "The Desktop Summit team welcomes keynote speakers from outside the GNOME and KDE world: confirmed speakers are Claire Rowland (Fjord, UX Design) and Thomas Thwaites (Technologist & Designer), with more to come! There will also be keynote addresses from representatives of both the GNOME and KDE communities. [...] The focus of the conference is collaboration between the Free Desktop projects. This year's conference tracks reflect the shared interests of its community. Just as the Desktop Summit unites the annual conferences of GNOME and KDE, each track similarly includes speakers from both desktop camps."

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Postgres Open Conference

The Postgres Open Conference will be held September 14-16, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois. "The theme of the inaugural conference is "disruption of the database industry". Topics will include new features in the latest version of PostgreSQL, use cases, product offerings and important announcements. Invited talks and presentations will cover many of the innovations in version 9.1, such as nearest-neighbor indexing, serializable snapshot isolation, and transaction-controlled synchronous replication. Vendors will also be announcing and demonstrating new products and services to enhance and extend PostgreSQL."

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ScilabTEC 2011

The program is available and registration is open for ScilabTEC 2011, the third Scilab Users Day, which takes place June 29 in Palaiseau, France.

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Events: June 2, 2011 to August 1, 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 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
July 25 July 29	OSCON 2011	Portland, OR, USA
July 30 July 31	PyOhio 2011	Columbus, OH, USA
July 30 August 6	Linux Beer Hike (LinuxBierWanderung)	Lanersbach, Tux, Austria

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

Videos from the Android Builders Summit

Videos of the talks from the Android Builders Summit, held in April, have now been posted. There are talks on Android internals, Linux audio for smartphones, device provisioning, Gerrit, GPL compliance, and more.

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FOSDEM and Embedded Linux Conference videos posted

The folks at Free Electrons have posted videos from the FOSDEM 2011 embedded track and from the 2011 Embedded Linux Conference. All videos are encoded in the WebM format.

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