Announcements

The Qt Project is about to launch

The "Qt Project," being the new governance structure for Qt, has announced its existence. "Since the Open Governance Model discussions started in July 2010, we have worked closely with the community to restructure the code base, design the governance structure, prepare the tooling, and define a contribution model for individuals and companies. And, we are excited to have a system in place that will be rolled out just five weeks from now."

Some more information can be found in this supplemental posting by chief maintainer Lars Knoll. "I want to make it very clear that the foundation will not steer the project in any way. The foundation is in place only to cover the costs of hosting and run the infrastructure. All technical decisions, as well as decisions about the project direction, will be taken by the community of Contributors, Approvers and Maintainers. For example this means that people in Nokia working on Qt will start working with Qt as an upstream project. Everyone will be using the same infrastructure, including mailing lists and IRC."

Comments (8 posted)

FSF's Star Turn in the Android FUDathon (LinuxInsider)

LinuxInsider is running an opinionated four-part series on the "GPLv2 death penalty" discussion and the Free Software Foundation's role in it. "While it is true that section 4 of the GPLv2 license terminates your right to redistribute when you fall out of compliance, section 6 is equally clear when it states that you get a valid license from the copyright-holder with each new copy you receive. Resuming distribution is simply a matter of returning to compliance and downloading a new copy. It's true that this won't 'fix' previous compliance problems; depending on their nature, they may have to be negotiated with the copyright-holders or decided by a court, but the threat of the ultimate "big stick" -- of never being able to resume distribution with the new license automatically granted under section 6 -- is an attempt to impose restrictions that neither a plain reading of the license nor the rules dealing with take-it-or-leave-it contracts allows."

Comments (53 posted)

Perens: The Covenant - A New Approach to Open Source Cooperation

Bruce Perens has posted a description of a scheme he came up with to make copyright assignment policies more acceptable to developers. The article is long, but the idea is straightforward: "A company can covenant, to each contributor of a copyright, to continue to support and maintain a project as Open Source, for a fixed period after a particular contribution - or to remove the contribution from their product if they cannot continue to Open Source their work. In this way, the Open Source developer would be assured of the continuing labor of paid developers on the project in exchange for his contribution, and thus the continued improvement of the program that he uses gratis as a community participant. By making the promise in exchange for the participation of the entire Open Source community, the company will have a better idea of the value it is expending and the value it receives than if it attempted to pay piecemeal for modifications. This covenant is renewed each time there is a new copyright assignment, in that the three-year counter starts anew every time the company receives a contribution from a developer. Thus, developers continue to be encouraged to contribute their copyrights to the company."

Comments (65 posted)

GStreamer Conference 2011

The schedule for the GStreamer Conference 2011 is available. "This year the GStreamer Conference includes presentations from the whole field of open source multimedia, not just GStreamer, with the goal for it to be the premier annual event for all things multimedia on linux and other open platforms." The conference takes place October 24-25 in Prague, Czech Republic.

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linux.conf.au 2012 schedule now available

This linux.conf.au organizing team has released a draft schedule for the January 2012 conference. "The Papers Committee worked incredibly hard to sift through the high quality submissions and select an array of presentations which are engaging and entertaining while delivering in-depth info across a variety of topics. There's something for everyone in this schedule, from those interested in kernel development, open hardware, community or packaging to the increasingly popular FOSS music and multimedia. It's going to be amazing! Both the Papers Committee and Organising Team were very enthusiastic about the high rate of talks accepted from female speakers - without any acceptance bias being needed in the selection process. Nearly a quarter of accepted talks will be given by female presenters - an encouraging sign of progress in the traditionally male-oriented conference."

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Events: September 22, 2011 to November 21, 2011

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
October 31 November 4	Ubuntu Developer Summit	Orlando, FL, USA
October 31 November 4	Linux on ARM: Linaro Connect Q4.11	Orlando, FL, USA
November 1 November 3	oVirt Workshop and Initial Code Release	San Jose, CA, USA
November 1 November 8	2011 Plone Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
November 4 November 6	Fedora Users and Developer's Conference : India 2011	Pune, India
November 4 November 6	Mozilla Festival -- Media, Freedom and the Web	London, United Kingdom
November 5 November 6	Technical Dutch Open Source Event	Eindhoven, The Netherlands
November 5 November 6	OpenFest 2011	Sofia, Bulgaria
November 7 November 11	ApacheCon NA 2011	Vancouver, Canada
November 8 November 12	Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing	Portland, Oregon, USA
November 10 November 12	Clojure/conj 2011	Raleigh, NC, USA
November 11 November 13	Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit 2011	Gothenburg, Sweden
November 11 November 12	Zentyal Summit	Zaragoza , Spain
November 12	London Perl Workshop 2011	London, United-Kingdom
November 12	Emacsforum 2011	Copenhagen, Denmark
November 14 November 17	SC11	Seattle, WA, USA
November 14 November 18	Open Source Developers Conference 2011	Canberra, Australia
November 17 November 18	LinuxCon Brazil 2011	São Paulo, Brazil
November 18	LLVM Developers' Meeting	San Jose, CA, USA
November 18 November 20	Foswiki Camp and General Assembly	Geneva, Swizerland
November 19 November 20	MediaWiki India Hackathon 2011 - Mumbai	Mumbai, India
November 20 November 22	Open Source India Days 2011	Bangalore, India

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