Announcements

Google Summer of Code 2012 is on

The 2012 edition of the Google Summer of Code has been announced. "This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all."

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The end of LinuxDevices?

LinuxDevices.com is carrying a brief note from the "outgoing editor-in-chief" stating that the site's owner has been acquired. "At this point, the future of LinuxDevices.com is uncertain. What we can say for sure is that it has been a pleasure serving our readers -- the best in the business."

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FSFE Newsletter - February 2012

The February edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe Newsletter looks at freeing your cell phone, learning to program, Document Freedom Day, the 2012 Fellowship election, and "I love Free Software" - Day.

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Gettys: Bufferbloat demonstration videos

Jim Gettys says: "If people have heard of bufferbloat at all, it is usually just an abstraction despite having personal experience with it. Bufferbloat can occur in your operating system, your home router, your broadband gear, wireless, and almost anywhere in the Internet. They still think that if experience poor Internet speed means they must need more bandwidth, and take vast speed variation for granted. Sometimes, adding bandwidth can actually hurt rather than help. Most people have no idea what they can do about bufferbloat. So I’ve been working to put together several demos to help make bufferbloat concrete, and demonstrate at least partial mitigation." Definitely useful viewing for anybody who is concerned with the problem and how to begin addressing it.

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Mueller: Apple's iterative approach to FRAND abuse is not for the faint of heart

Florian Mueller's update on the patent battles between Apple, Motorola, and Samsung has a clear slant, but it is still a worthwhile look at how the mobile patent wars may be settled. There is little cheer for the free software world here. "They hope that the disruptive impact of such injunctions on Apple's business will force Apple to grant them a license to all of its non-standards-related patents (such as its multitouch inventions) as part of a broader settlement. In other words, they want to use FRAND patents to reach a state of 'mutually assured destruction', in which the notion of intellectual property would become meaningless between large players that have a critical mass of patents (it would merely serve to exclude new entrants without large patent portfolios)."

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Seigo: Spark answers

Aaron Seigo answers questions about the Spark tablet, which is based on Plasma Active, that he announced on January 29. There is more information about the hardware and software, delivery timeframe (May 2012), and pre-orders: "Pre-order registration will open early next week. This was one piece in the puzzle that was taking a bit [longer] than I hoped for to come together, but it's finally slotted in and our distribution partner has got the necessary infrastructure settled. I'll lift the veil off of the pre-order and our distribution strategy when it goes live."

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Upton: Raspberry Pi: Two things you thought you weren’t going to get

Liz Upton reports that Raspberry Pi boards will be available by the end of the month. "There’s another big piece of news today. We’ve been leaning (gently and charmingly) on Broadcom, who make BCM2835, the SoC at the heart of the Raspberry Pi, to produce an abbreviated datasheet describing the ARM peripherals in the chip. If you’re a casual user, this won’t be of much interest to you, but if you’re wanting to port your own operating system or just want to understand our Linux kernel sources, this is the document for you." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Wheeler: New Hampshire: Open source, open standards, open data

David A. Wheeler reports that the US state of New Hampshire has passed an act requiring state agencies to consider open source software, promote the use of open data formats, and it requires the commissioner of information technology (IT) to develop an open government data policy. "First, here’s what it says about open source software (OSS): “For all software acquisitions, each state agency… shall… Consider whether proprietary or open source software offers the most cost effective software solution for the agency, based on consideration of all associated acquisition, support, maintenance, and training costs…”. Notice that this law does not mandate that the state government must always use OSS. Instead, it simply requires government agencies to consider OSS. You’d think this would be useless, but you’d be wrong. Fairly considering OSS is still remarkably hard to do in many government agencies, so having a law or regulation clearly declare this is very valuable. Yes, closed-minded people can claim they “considered” OSS and paper over their biases, but laws like this make it easier for OSS to get a fair hearing. The law defines “open source software” (OSS) in a way consistent with its usual technical definition, indeed, this law’s definition looks a lot like the free software definition. That’s a good thing; the impact of laws and regulations is often controlled by their definitions, so having good definitions (like this one for OSS) is really important."

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"Open Advice" from 42 free software contributors

"Open Advice" is a new book consisting of essays from some 42 community authors; it is available in print form or downloadable under the CC-BY-SA license. "This book is the answer to 'What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?'. The authors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project, coding of course but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. We are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, we are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects."

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Akademy 2012 Call for Papers

The KDE community conference, Akademy, will take place June 30-July 6 in Tallin, Estonia. Registration is open now, as is the call for papers which will close March 15. See this announcement for details. "Akademy features a 2-day conference packed with presentations on the latest KDE developments, followed by 5 days of workshops, birds of a feather (BoF) and coding sessions."

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The SuperCollider Algostep Remix Competition

The SuperCollider Symposium 2012 will be held April 12-19 in London, UK. The SuperCollider Algostep Remix Competition is accepting entries until April 1. The idea is to remix SuperCollider code which is provided online.

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Events: February 9, 2012 to April 9, 2012

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
February 6 February 10	Linux on ARM: Linaro Connect Q1.12	San Francisco, CA, USA
February 10 February 12	Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe Winter session 2012	Minsk, Belarus
February 10 February 12	Skolelinux/Debian Edu developer gathering	Oslo, Norway
February 13 February 14	Android Builder's Summit	Redwood Shores, CA, USA
February 15 February 17	2012 Embedded Linux Conference	Redwood Shores, CA, USA
February 16 February 17	Embedded Technology Conference 2012	San José, Costa Rica
February 17 February 18	Red Hat, Fedora, JBoss Developer Conference	Brno, Czech Republic
February 24 February 25	PHP UK Conference 2012	London, UK
February 27 March 2	ConFoo Web Techno Conference 2012	Montreal, Canada
February 28	Israeli Perl Workshop 2012	Ramat Gan, Israel
March 2 March 4	Debian BSP in Cambridge	Cambridge, UK
March 2 March 4	BSP2012 - Moenchengladbach	Mönchengladbach, Germany
March 5 March 7	14. German Perl Workshop	Erlangen, Germany
March 6 March 10	CeBIT 2012	Hannover, Germany
March 7 March 15	PyCon 2012	Santa Clara, CA, USA
March 10 March 11	Open Source Days 2012	Copenhagen, Denmark
March 10 March 11	Debian BSP in Perth	Perth, Australia
March 16 March 17	Clojure/West	San Jose, CA, USA
March 17 March 18	Chemnitz Linux Days	Chemnitz, Germany
March 23 March 24	Cascadia IT Conference (LOPSA regional conference)	Seattle, WA, USA
March 24 March 25	LibrePlanet 2012	Boston, MA, USA
March 26 April 1	Wireless Battle of the Mesh (V5)	Athens, Greece
March 26 March 29	EclipseCon 2012	Washington D.C., USA
March 28 March 29	Palmetto Open Source Software Conference 2012	Columbia, South Carolina, USA
March 28	PGDay Austin 2012	Austin, TX, USA
March 29	Program your own open source system-on-a-chip (OpenRISC)	London, UK
March 30	PGDay DC 2012	Sterling, VA, USA
April 2	PGDay NYC 2012	New York, NY, USA
April 3 April 5	LF Collaboration Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 5 April 6	Android Open	San Francisco, CA, USA

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