Announcements

Brockmeier: Anti-rantifesto: Why free software and free culture aren't the same

On his Network World blog, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier has posted a rebuttal to Nina Paley's "rantifesto" on free culture vs. free software. "Not only is the process for creating cultural works different, so is the process for enjoying them and working with them. While a person might enjoy having the rights to modify a book, essay, or movie, the works function as intended without those rights. The same is often not true of code. Users legitimately need the rights to fix and distribute software that does not work properly on their hardware, no one "needs" the right to revise non-variant sections of GNU documentation containing RMS' opinions on free software."

Comments (57 posted)

DeRose: Designing pro creative apps (Part 1-3)

Jason Gerard DeRose, a developer with Novacut, is working on a collaborative video editor for Ubuntu. DeRose has been blogging about the project and lessons learned along the way. This is from part 3; "Please don't lecture artists about how they should be using free-software for ideological reasons. Instead, talk to them about how you're going to build them superior creative tools. Many well-intending free-software advocates have made this mistake. I know I've been guilty of this. But as a community, we must become more sympathetic to artists. If we're asking them to switch to inferior tools, we're asking them to make a totally unreasonable sacrifice. You cannot expect artists to toss their child in the river to get a new pair of sneakers." You might want to start with part 1 and part 2. (Thanks to Paul Wise)

Comments (64 posted)

Google: "Android is the Linux desktop dream come true" (der Standard)

der Standard interviews Chris DiBona. "If you look at Android we have lots of partners. We have chipset partners, we have handset partners, we have carrier partners. They all want to use Android and they all want to have something special about themselves. So they want to use Android for that specialness. What that means is that one handset vendor probably doesn't want to interact too much with the other handset vendors because they are competitors. And Android gets caught in the middle of all of this. And the bigger question then becomes how you architect software that it's still useful around that kind of model."

Comments (42 posted)

Microsoft's Android Shakedown (Forbes)

This Forbes article on software patents and Android probably has little that is new for LWN readers, but it is a clear explanation of the situation and the problems with software patents. "Getting software patents takes a lot of work, but it's not primarily engineering effort. The complexity of software and low standards for patent eligibility mean that software engineers produce potentially patentable ideas all the time. But most engineers don't think of these relatively trivial ideas as 'inventions' worthy of a patent. What's needed to get tens of thousands of patents is a re-education campaign to train engineers to write down every trivial idea that pops into their heads, and a large and disciplined legal bureaucracy to turn all those ideas into patent applications."

Comments (18 posted)

openSUSE Conference team announces opening of registration

The openSUSE Conference will be held September 11-14, 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany. Registration is open and the call for proposals deadline has been extended until July 24.

Full Story (comments: none)

Events: July 21, 2011 to September 19, 2011

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
July 17 July 23	DebCamp	Banja Luka, Bosnia
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
August 10 August 12	USENIX Security ’11: 20th USENIX Security Symposium	San Francisco, CA, USA
August 10 August 14	Chaos Communication Camp 2011	Finowfurt, Germany
August 13 August 14	OggCamp 11	Farnham, UK
August 15 August 16	KVM Forum 2011	Vancouver, BC, Canada
August 15 August 17	YAPC::Europe 2011 “Modern Perl”	Riga, Latvia
August 17 August 19	LinuxCon North America 2011	Vancouver, Canada
August 20 August 21	PyCon Australia	Sydney, Australia
August 20 August 21	Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters	Tapei, Taiwan
August 22 August 26	8th Netfilter Workshop	Freiburg, Germany
August 23	Government Open Source Conference	Washington, DC, USA
August 25 August 28	EuroSciPy	Paris, France
August 25 August 28	GNU Hackers Meeting	Paris, France
August 26	Dynamic Language Conference 2011	Edinburgh, United-Kingdom
August 27 August 28	Kiwi PyCon 2011	Wellington, New Zealand
August 27	PyCon Japan 2011	Tokyo, Japan
August 27	SC2011 - Software Developers Haven	Ottawa, ON, Canada
August 30 September 1	Military Open Source Software (MIL-OSS) WG3 Conference	Atlanta, GA, USA
September 6 September 8	Conference on Domain-Specific Languages	Bordeaux, France
September 7 September 9	Linux Plumbers' Conference	Santa Rosa, CA, USA
September 8	Linux Security Summit 2011	Santa Rosa, CA, USA
September 8 September 9	Italian Perl Workshop 2011	Turin, Italy
September 8 September 9	Lua Workshop 2011	Frick, Switzerland
September 9 September 11	State of the Map 2011	Denver, Colorado, USA
September 9 September 11	Ohio LinuxFest 2011	Columbus, OH, USA
September 10 September 11	PyTexas 2011	College Station, Texas, USA
September 10 September 11	SugarCamp Paris 2011 - "Fix Sugar Documentation!"	Paris, France
September 11 September 14	openSUSE Conference	Nuremberg, Germany
September 12 September 14	X.Org Developers' Conference	Chicago, Illinois, USA
September 14 September 16	Postgres Open	Chicago, IL, USA
September 14 September 16	GNU Radio Conference 2011	Philadelphia, PA, USA
September 15	Open Hardware Summit	New York, NY, USA
September 16	LLVM European User Group Meeting	London, United Kingdom
September 16 September 18	Creative Commons Global Summit 2011	Warsaw, Poland
September 16 September 18	Pycon India 2011	Pune, India
September 18 September 20	Strange Loop	St. Louis, MO, USA

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