Announcements
Brief items
A new round in GNOME's outreach program for women
The GNOME project has announced a new round in its outreach program for women, with ten applicants accepted to work with the project. "Over three quarters of the women involved in the program have stayed connected to the GNOME community. Better still, Outreach Program for Women participants have a strong tradition of becoming mentors in GNOME."
The Document Foundation announces a Certification Program
The Document Foundation has announced a Certification Program, "to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice and help the growth of the ecosystem of the world's best free office suite."
Articles of interest
FSFE Newsletter - May 2012
The May edition of the Free Software Foundation Europe newsletter covers Document Freedom Day and the Day against DRM, Free Software and the French Presidential elections, vendor lock-in in Helsinki, the UK Open Standard consultation, and several other topics.Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)
Ars technica reports on the confused verdict in the first phase of Oracle v. Google, where Google won most of the arguments but, maybe, was found to have infringed copyright via its use of the Java APIs. "But the jury couldn't reach agreement on a second issue—whether Google had a valid 'fair use' defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week."
Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)
In this two page article on Datamation, Bruce Byfield looks at the history and the current state of the Linux desktop. From the second page: "In studying this transformation of the Linux desktop, you can easily see possible turning points. What would have happened if the KDE 4.0 release had been delayed until it had more features? If Ubuntu had been more patient about its changes getting into GNOME? If GNOME 3 had been less radical, or user complaints addressed? If some or all of these events had occurred, then maybe GNOME and KDE would have remained as dominant as ever. However, I doubt it. More likely, other incidents would have caused a similar fragmentation sooner or later, no matter how anyone acted."
SAS v. WPL decision addresses boundaries of copyrights on software (opensource.com)
Over at opensource.com, Richard Fontana explains the recent European Court of Justice (ECJ, Europe's equivalent to the US Supreme Court) ruling on the copyrightability of software. It's not at all hard to see parallels in that ruling and the current copyright questions in the Oracle v. Google case (in fact the judge in that case has asked the parties to answer questions about the ruling). "With respect to manuals concerning programming or scripting languages, the court said that 'the keywords, syntax, commands and combinations of commands, options, defaults and iterations consist of words, figures or mathematical concepts' which are not copyrightable expression in themselves, even where they are contained in a larger work that is copyrightable. Copyrightable expression can arise only from 'the choice, sequence and combination of those words, figures or mathematical concepts'."
Hands On with Boot2Gecko (Wired)
Wired plays with a Boot2Gecko phone. "At this point, B2G’s user interface consists of a few home screens’ worth of apps, each of which can be launched by tapping a rectangular icon. The apps may be web-based, but launched blazingly fast because most were cached onto the phones. Thanks to the caching scheme, B2G phones will still work when a network signal is out of reach."
New Books
Programming in Go - Addison-Wesley Professional
Addison-Wesley Professional has released "Programming in Go" by Mark Summerfield.Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf
Pragmatic Bookshelf has released "Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition" by Stuart Halloway and Aaron Bedra.
Calls for Presentations
PyCon Ireland 2012
Python Ireland will take place October 13-14, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland. Early bird registration and the call for papers are open.14th Real Time Linux Workshop - Call for Papers
The 14th Real Time Linux Workshop will take place in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 18-20, 2012. The call for papers is open until July 23. "Authors from regulatory bodies, academics, industry as well as the user-community are invited to submit original work dealing with general topics related to Open Source and Free Software based real-time systems research, experiments and case studies, as well as issues of integration of open-source real-time and embedded OS. A special focus will be on industrial case studies and safety related systems."
Upcoming Events
Formally announcing FUDCon: Paris and FUDCon: Lawrence.
Two upcoming FUDCons (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) have been announced. There will be a FUDCon in Paris, France October 13-15, 2012 and a FUDCon in Lawrence, Kansas January 18-20, 2013.Events: May 10, 2012 to July 9, 2012
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol