Announcements

The Document Foundation incorporated

The Document Foundation was officially incorporated in Berlin, Germany. "André Schnabel, Chairman of the Membership Committee, stated the Foundation’s openness: “I am sure we will see the community prospering and growing even more, now that the legal entity has been created. Finally, after nearly 12 years, the community has created a Foundation that ideally fits to its needs, that is vendor-neutral, that provides safety, builds trust, and that sends out a strong sign of stability to all stakeholders. I would like to repeat our honest invitation to everyone interested in the future of free office suites, to join The Document Foundation, no matter if you are an individual volunteer, employee of a software vendor or support our activities with help from local non-profit organizations.”"

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No more Flash for Firefox on Linux

Adobe has announced that its proprietary Flash plugin will be moving to a new "Pepper" API for interaction with the browser, leaving the old Netscape plugin API behind. "For Flash Player releases after 11.2, the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe. Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release."

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Time zone database suit withdrawn

Here's a press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation announcing the end of Astrolabe's lawsuit against the managers of the time zone database and a covenant not to sue again in the future. "In a statement, Astrolabe said, 'Astrolabe's lawsuit against Mr. Olson and Mr. Eggert was based on a flawed understanding of the law. We now recognize that historical facts are no one's property and, accordingly, are withdrawing our Complaint. We deeply regret the disruption that our lawsuit caused for the volunteers who maintain the TZ database, and for Internet users.'"

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Seigo: Spark pre-order registration is open!

Aaron Seigo announces pre-registration for the Spark tablet, which is based on Mer OS and Plasma Active, on his blog. "Over the next two months we will be unveiling more and more about Make Play Live on the website. Fun things like the Spark logo and branding will be unveiled; but important information will also start to appear, such as how you can get involved as an app developer, how to join our logistics network on the retail side and further details on our long term roadmap. I'll of course keep you all in the loop here on my blog as things move forward. [...] Head on over to Make Play Live to register your interest now and help us spread the word around the 'net and amongst your friends. Together we can make Spark a terrific success and show the world how great an open device experience can be."

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Upcoming Debian Bug Squashing Parties

The Debian Project has announced several Bug Squashing Parties (BSP) will take place in several countries. "The main focus of a Bug Squashing Party is to triage and fix bugs, but it is also an opportunity for users less familiar with the BTS to make other contributions to the Debian project, such as translating package descriptions or improving the wiki. Debian developers will be present to help contributors understand how the project works and to help get fixes into Debian."

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Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek)

The 14th Python Game Programming Challenge (PyWeek) will be held April 22-29 May 6-13, 2012. Entrants may work alone, or form teams to write a game from scratch during that week.

Update: As this correction notes, the dates were wrong in the original (as reflected in the strike-through above).

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PyCon DE 2012

PyCon DE 2012 will be held in Leipzig, Germany October 29-November 3. "One tutorial day, three days with talks and two days with a barcamp and sprints will provide a variety of types to communicate about Python. There will be social events to give everybody ample opportunity to network with like-minded Pythonistas."

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Events: February 23, 2012 to April 23, 2012

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
April 10 April 12	Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo 2012	Santa Clara, CA, United States
April 12 April 15	Linux Audio Conference 2012	Stanford, CA, USA
April 12 April 19	SuperCollider Symposium	London, UK
April 12 April 13	European LLVM Conference	London, UK
April 13	Drizzle Day	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 16 April 18	OpenStack "Folsom" Design Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 17 April 19	Workshop on Real-time, Embedded and Enterprise-Scale Time-Critical Systems	Paris, France
April 19 April 20	OpenStack Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
April 21	international Openmobility conference 2012	Prague, Czech Republic

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

ABS/ELC videos available

The Linux Foundation has posted videos of the talks given at the 2012 Android Builders Summit and Embedded Linux Conference. While most of the talks are up, evidently they are still working on some of the videos; the remaining talks should appear shortly.

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