Announcements
Brief items
EFF Launches New Patent Reform Project to Defend Innovation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced a new patent reform project called "Defend Innovation". "EFF has posted seven proposals for software patent reform at Defendinnovation.org, including shortening the term for software patents from 20 years to no more than five years, allowing winning parties in litigation to recover fees and costs, and ensuring that infringers who arrive at a patented idea independently aren't held liable, for example. EFF is asking the public to sign on to the proposals and to make additional comments of their own. Additionally, we're calling on individual inventors, lawyers, and academics to give feedback, and we're asking technology companies to continue the conversation with in-person meetings with EFF staff. EFF will take the results from these comments and meetings and create a whitepaper to help educate lawmakers and others about the full reach of the problem and next steps forward to fix it."
FSFE to Advance Fair Public IT Procurements in Finland
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has started an initiative to advance fair public procurements in Finland. "The initiative concentrates on IT related procurement notices that require brand instead of defining functionalities required by the procurer. To date FSFE has skimmed over 300 procurement notices, and of those taken into closer analysis, 14 have been found to clearly violate the Finnish procurement law. These violating notices explicitly asked for tenders of specific brands of software manufacturers or products and thus discriminate all other brands and manufacturers, effectively stopping free competition."
2012 LinuxCon Japan videos available
Linux.com has the videos from LinuxCon Japan, which was held earlier this month. (Thanks to Shawn Landden)Linux Foundation gain 5 new members
The Linux Foundation has announced 5 new Silver members: Adeneo, Feuerlabs, Omnibond, STEC and Synopsys.
Articles of interest
Duffy: Women in Advanced Computing 2012 Summit
On her blog, Máirín Duffy has written about four separate talks from the USENIX Women in Advanced Computing 2012 Summit. Included are talks from Leslie Lambert, Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer, Juniper Networks; Emily Gladstone Cole, Operations Architect, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Clea Zolotow, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM; and Sabrina Farmer, Site Reliabity Engineer, Google Inc. The write-ups are quite thorough and interesting. From Farmer: "In Gmail, if something goes wrong, it’s in the news. You’re responsible for hundreds of millions of people’s email on that team. Her first press interview for Gmail was terrifying, but amazing. The next reporter asked for her by name. Having an outage in the NY Times would be really bad – it’s a very high risk position. You can’t, however, have success without failure – you won’t grow if you don’t fail along the way. It’s how you handle that failure that matters. The worst thing that can happen when you fail is probably not as bad as you think."
New Books
E-book: Getting Things Done for Hackers
Lars Wirzenius has released his ebook Getting Things Done For Hackers under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. "David Allen's "Getting Things Done", or GTD for short, is a popular, powerful system for managing one's life. If you have trouble dealing with your e-mail inbox, or feel you're drowning under a flood of inputs and information, or just don't seem to have time to do everything you think you should be doing, or others want you to do, then GTD may be a good thing for you to consider. This book explains how I, a computer geek, have implemented it in my own life. It is aimed at everyone whose lives include a lot of computer use, and who know how to use their computers."
YUI 3 Cookbook: Writing Maintainable Applications--New from O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media has released "YUI 3 Cookbook" by Evan Goer.
Education and Certification
Free Electrons releases Android training materials
The folks at Free Electrons have announced the release of their Android training materials under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 license. "Our course targets engineers who need to develop embedded systems with Google Android, customizing Android to support specific hardware and product requirements." See the course agenda [PDF] for details on the covered material.
LPI: Linux Essentials Heroes Complete Beta Tests
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced the completion of the beta test for its new Linux Essentials exam. "The Linux Essentials exam will be available at the end of June 2012 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in other nations around the world in 2013."
Calls for Presentations
Announcing FOSS.IN/2012
FOSS.IN is back by popular demand. FOSS.IN is one of India's oldest and best-known annual international technology events. Although there was no 2011 conference, it will be back for 2012 in Bangalore, India, November 29-December 1. The call for participation is currently open till July 8th.openSUSE Summit CfP extended
The openSUSE Summit takes place September 21-23, 2012 in Orlando, Florida. The call for papers deadline has been extended until June 30.
Upcoming Events
PyCon Australia 2012 Conference Program
PyCon Australia will take place August 18-19, 2012 in Hobart, Tasmania. The program has been announced. "Our keynote presenters, Mark Ramm, Engineering Manager on Juju at Canonical, and Kenneth Reitz, Python lead at Heroku will be joined by a wide array of presenters covering a broad range of backgrounds, including industry, research, government and academia."
Events: June 21, 2012 to August 20, 2012
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| June 19 June 21 |
Solutions Linux Open Source | Paris, France |
| June 20 June 21 |
Open Source Summit (NASA, State Dept, VA) | College Park, MD, USA |
| June 26 June 29 |
Open Source Bridge: The conference for open source citizens | Portland, Oregon, USA |
| June 26 July 2 |
GNOME & Mono Festival of Love 2012 | Boston, MA, USA |
| June 30 July 6 |
Akademy (KDE conference) 2012 | Tallinn, Estonia |
| June 30 July 1 |
Quack And Hack 2012 | Paoli, PA, USA |
| July 1 July 7 |
DebConf 2012 | Managua, Nicaragua |
| July 2 July 8 |
EuroPython 2012 | Florence, Italy |
| July 5 | London Lua user group | London, UK |
| July 6 July 8 |
3. Braunschweiger Atari & Amiga Meeting | Braunschweig, Germany |
| July 7 July 12 |
Libre Software Meeting / Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre | Geneva, Switzerland |
| July 7 July 8 |
10th European Tcl/Tk User Meeting | Munich, Germany |
| July 8 July 14 |
DebConf12 | Managua, Nicaragua |
| July 9 July 11 |
GNU Tools Cauldron 2012 | Prague, Czech Republic |
| July 10 July 15 |
Wikimania | Washington, DC, USA |
| July 10 July 11 |
AdaCamp Washington, DC | Washington, DC, USA |
| July 11 | PuppetCamp Geneva @RMLL/LSM | Geneva, Switzerland |
| July 11 July 13 |
Linux Symposium | Ottawa, Canada |
| July 14 July 15 |
Community Leadership Summit 2012 | Portland, OR, USA |
| July 16 July 20 |
OSCON | Portland, OR, USA |
| July 26 July 29 |
GNOME Users And Developers European Conference | A Coruña, Spain |
| August 3 August 4 |
Texas Linux Fest | San Antonio, TX, USA |
| August 8 August 10 |
21st USENIX Security Symposium | Bellevue, WA, USA |
| August 18 August 19 |
PyCon Australia 2012 | Hobart, Tasmania |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol