Announcements
Brief items
Ada Initiative "Seed 100" donation campaign opens
The Ada Initiative has started a fundraising campaign to find 100 folks willing to donate at two different levels: "Difference Engineer" for $512 or "Analytical Engineer" for $1024. Thank-you gifts are offered for each level. The Ada Initiative is a non-profit that seeks to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture. "The Ada Initiative is opening its first fundraising campaign, the Seed 100 campaign! The Seed 100 campaign will fund our remaining startup costs, in particular project development for projects like First Patch Week, and continued work on conference policy development, so that we can take them to future partners and larger donors."
FSF: Announcing our license recommendations guide
Brett Smith of the Free Software Foundation has announced a license recommendation guide. "Today I'm happy to share something we've been working on for a little while: "How to choose a license for your own work" is a comprehensive set of license recommendations for new projects. This page explains what factors are important to consider when making licensing decisions, and suggests specific licenses for different scenarios. If you're starting a new project (whether it's software, documentation, or something else related) and unsure what license to use, you just need this one link to find our recommendations." (Bradley Kuhn has some comments on the recommendation site on his blog as well.)
Libertine Open Fonts Project releases version 5.0.0
The Libertine Open Fonts Project has announced the release of version 5.0.0 of the open source font families Libertine and Biolinum. "Since 2003 the Libertine Open Fonts Project works on a versatile Unicode font family with an elegant, good-readable type face for daily and professional use. It is designed to give you an alternative for fonts like T*mes New Roman. We're creating /free/ software and publish our fonts under terms of the GPL and Open Font License (OFL)."
Linaro plan reviews (May 31st to June 8th)
Linaro will be holding a series of conference calls to present the engineering plans for various work groups starting on May 31. Each one hour call will be held at 15:00 UTC with dial-in numbers available for most countries, and there will be an IRC channel for questions. "For each call we will provide a set of slides discussing features planned and the blueprints that specify and track them. The calls are open to the general public; anybody is welcome to dial in and listen." The first review will be the Power Management working group on Tuesday.
Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation
Oracle has proposed contributing the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) incubator program. So far, there is no announcement per se from Oracle, but there is a collection of statements from people associated with Oracle, Apache, and, perhaps not surprisingly, IBM, including "'With today's proposal to contribute the OpenOffice.org code to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator, Oracle continues to demonstrate its commitment to the developer and open source communities. Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future. The Apache Software Foundation's model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development.' -- Luke Kowalski, vice president, Oracle Corporate Architecture Group."
As might also be expected, The Document Foundation (which is behind the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org) is a bit disappointed with the move: "The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms — licensing, membership and more — to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
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In addition, IBM's ODF architect Rob Weir has issued a call for contributors to the ASF project if it gets accepted: "At Apache, you can't just walk in off the street, drop some code and call yourself an Apache project. There is a multi-step process for initiating, reviewing and approving a new project. We're at the first step, with the proposal submission, which Oracle made earlier today. This proposal will now be reviewed and voted on by the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee (PMC) over the next few days. If approved, the project then advances into incubation as a "Podling". Incubation at Apache is a probationary stage, where the project recruits new members, reviews the code to establish IP provenance, adapts the project to the Apache infrastructure, and so on.
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Articles of interest
Linux Foundation Monthly Newsletter: May 2011
The May edition of the Linux Foundation Monthly Newsletter covers LinuxCon Japan, Linux T-shirt, Video Contest deadline, and several other topics.HTC: no more locked-down phones
The CEO of HTC has seemingly posted on Facebook that its phones will not be locked down from now on. "Today, I'm confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience."
Morevna Project progress, project problems...
The Morevna Project seeks to create a full-length anime movie using open source software. The Morevna project blog has a status report after three years of development. "First of all, we weren't sure if the software we have chose is able to handle the tasks that we need. For Blender (for 3D works) everything was quite clear — that tool is stable enough and already proven with a series of Blender Foundation's open movie projects... But 3D in Morevna Project handles just a helper function — Morevna is mostly about 2D animation! And the all burden here comes to Synfig Studio, which is completely different case! Without any usage cases of such scale, questional stability, totally undeveloped character animation techniques... There were few examples of characters animation, but we wanted the complex motion. This most powerful open-source animation tool still had a lots of issues. We just weren't sure if this tool will be able to handle all the tasks (OK, well... in terms of faith we were sure, but have no idea how)." (Thanks to Paul Wise) LWN looked at the project in March 2010.
New Books
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
The Architecture of Open Source Applications is a new book with chapters on the design of a wide variety of programs, including Asterisk, bash, Eclipse, LLVM, Mercurial, Sendmail, Telepathy, and many more. It's available for purchase or downloadable under the terms of the CC Attribution 3.0 license; some readers have already taken advantage of that license to make an epub version available. Revenue from sales go to Amnesty International.
Calls for Presentations
#PgWest 2011: Call for Papers
PostgreSQL Conference West will be held September 27-30, 2011 in San Jose, California. The talk submission deadline is July 31.Call for papers - PGConf.EU 2011
PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2011 will be held on Ocober 18-21, 2011 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The submission deadline is August 21.
Upcoming Events
PyCon Ireland 2011: Registration now open
PyCon Ireland will be held October 8-9, 2011 in Dublin, Ireland. Early bird and student tickets are available and the call for talks is open.Events: June 9, 2011 to August 8, 2011
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| August 4 August 7 |
Wikimania 2011 | Haifa, Israel |
| August 6 August 12 |
Desktop Summit | Berlin, Germany |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol