Announcements

HP dropping webOS devices

HP has sent out an unhappy press release stating that it is exploring "strategic alternatives" for its Personal Systems Group. "In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward."

Comments (93 posted)

FSF: Android GPLv2 termination worries: one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3

In a release seen by many as FUD, the Free Software Foundation is urging projects to use version 3 of the General Public License (GPLv3). They note that Android's commercial success has lead to an increase in GPL violations from Android distributors. "[P]eople still seek out our opinions about the relevant parts of the GPL, and that discussion has recently turned to GPLv2's termination provisions. Section 4 of the license says, "You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License." When we enforce the license of FSF-copyrighted software, we give violators back the rights they had after they come into compliance. In our experience, developers of Linux are happy to do the same. Unfortunately, even if we assume they all would restore these rights, it would be extremely difficult to have them all formally do so; there are simply too many copyright holders involved, some of whom haven't worked on the project in years or even decades."

Full Story (comments: none)

Android OEMs should hear Microsoft, Nokia out on Google-Motorola combo (ars technica)

Ars technica speculates on how Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility will change the Android market. "For the time being, at least, Google claims that Motorola will be operated as a "separate business unit"-it will be owned by Google, but operationally will function like any other Android licensee. However, a claim made in a Wall Street Journal profile of Andy Rubin, the founder of Android Inc. and Google's senior vice president of Mobile, suggests that Google may not be telling the whole story. Specifically, the article says that "People close to the deal said one of Google's motivations was its desire to design devices, not just the software that powers them, thus giving it the sort of influence that rival Apple enjoys with its iPhone and iPad." Such a move would change the nature of the Google-Motorola relationship radically, and it's difficult to see how this wouldn't give Motorola a substantial advantage over other Android OEMs."

Comments (47 posted)

Articles from LinuxCon

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has several articles covering this week's LinuxCon. Jim Zemlin gave the opening keynote posing the question "What would the world be like without Linux?"

In The Next 20 Years? Who Knows? Joe covers a keynote speech by Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.

Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman took the stage for a question and answer session, with Greg asking the questions.

Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger was formerly responsible for IBM's response to emerging technologies. In his keynote he talked about the disruptive force of Linux then and now, and IBM's relationship with Linux through the years.

Comments (18 posted)

Wirzenius: Linux at 20, some personal memories

Lars Wirzenius reminisces about the early days of Linux. "Linus's multitasking program grew, and grew, and gained features such as a hard disk driver, and memory management, and a filesystem. He had enough of a kernel to run some userspace programs, and he made it so that he could compiler programs on Minix, and run them on his own kernel. By this time, summer of 1991, we had both started posting to Usenet. In August, Linus mentioned his kernel project on comp.os.minix for the first time. Later on, he decided to make the code available, and got one of the admins of ftp.funet.fi to put it there. For this, the project needed a name. Linus wanted to call it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, the ftp.funet.fi admin, decided to call it Linux instead. You can find the Freax name in the Makefile of the earliest Linux releases."

Comments (none posted)

The openSUSE Conference Program and Keynote Speakers

The conference program and keynote speakers for the openSUSE conference (September 11-14, 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany) have been announced. "We have scheduled more than 100 contributions in the four days of the conference. More than 50% of those are interactive like birds of a feather sessions (BoFs) and workshops, that is along with our motto RWX³ which basically means that people should not only just listen, but also do things." Some social events have also been announced.

Comments (none posted)

Events: September 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
September 19 September 22	BruCON 2011	Brussels, Belgium
September 22 September 25	Pycon Poland 2011	Kielce, Poland
September 23 September 24	Open Source Developers Conference France 2011	Paris, France
September 23 September 24	PyCon Argentina 2011	Buenos Aires, Argentina
September 24 September 25	PyCon UK 2011	Coventry, UK
September 27 September 30	PostgreSQL Conference West	San Jose, CA, USA
September 27 September 29	Nagios World Conference North America 2011	Saint Paul, MN, USA
September 29 October 1	Python Brasil [7]	São Paulo, Brazil
September 30 October 3	Fedora Users and Developers Conference: Milan 2011	Milan, Italy
October 1 October 2	WineConf 2011	Minneapolis, MN, USA
October 1 October 2	Big Android BBQ	Austin, TX, USA
October 3 October 5	OpenStack "Essex" Design Summit	Boston, MA, USA
October 4 October 9	PyCon DE	Leipzig, Germany
October 6 October 9	EuroBSDCon 2011	Netherlands
October 7 October 9	Linux Autumn 2011	Kielce, Poland
October 7 October 10	Open Source Week 2011	Malang, Indonesia
October 8 October 9	PyCon Ireland 2011	Dublin, Ireland
October 8 October 9	Pittsburgh Perl Workshop 2011	Pittsburgh, PA, USA
October 8	PHP North West Conference	Manchester, UK
October 8 October 10	GNOME "Boston" Fall Summit 2011	Montreal, QC, Canada
October 8	FLOSSUK / UKUUG's 2011 Unconference	Manchester, UK
October 9 October 11	Android Open	San Francisco, CA, USA
October 11	PLUG Talk: Rusty Russell	Perth, Australia
October 12 October 15	LibreOffice Conference	Paris, France
October 14 October 16	MediaWiki Hackathon New Orleans	New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
October 14	Workshop Packaging BlankOn	Jakarta , Indonesia
October 15	Packaging Debian Class BlankOn	Surabaya, Indonesia
October 17 October 18	PyCon Finland 2011	Turku, Finland
October 18 October 21	PostgreSQL Conference Europe	Amsterdam, The Netherlands
October 19 October 21	13th German Perl Workshop	Frankfurt/Main, Germany
October 19 October 21	Latinoware 2011	Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil
October 20 October 22	13th Real-Time Linux Workshop	Prague, Czech Republic
October 21 October 23	PHPCon Poland 2011	Kielce, Poland
October 21	PG-Day Denver 2011	Denver, CO, USA
October 23 October 25	Kernel Summit	Prague, Czech Republic
October 24 October 28	18th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference (Tcl'2011)	Manassas, Virgina, USA
October 24 October 25	GitTogether 2011	Mountain View, CA, USA
October 24 October 25	GStreamer Conference 2011	Prague, Czech Republic
October 26 October 28	Embedded Linux Conference Europe	Prague, Czech Republic
October 26 October 28	LinuxCon Europe 2011	Prague, Czech Republic
October 28 October 30	MiniDebConf Mangalore India	Mangalore, India
October 29	buildroot + crosstool-NG Developers' Day	Prague, Czech Republic

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