Announcements

The EFF's 2012 Pioneer Award winners

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2012 Pioneer Awards: Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Jérémie Zimmermann, and the Tor Project. "Andrew (bunnie) Huang is an activist who takes a push-and-pull approach to open hardware: he contributes original open designs and also liberates closed designs. Huang's book on reverse engineering, 'Hacking the Xbox,' is a widely respected tool for hardware hackers."

Comments (1 posted)

Helios - Ken Starks - the immediate need is over

Last week we reported a fund raising campaign for Ken Starks. The goals have been exceeded. "Asking for anything more would be taking advantage of a loving and generous community. While it is far from adequate, the only thing I can offer you is my eternal thanks. It just seems so....small of a thing to give in return."

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Open Invention Network expands coverage

The Open Invention Network has announced the expansion of its "Linux System Definition" to include 18 new packages of interest in the mobile arena. They include the core Android code and the Dalvik virtual machine — code that seems more than usually likely to draw patent suits.

Comments (6 posted)

Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)

Creative Commons (CC) is in the process of drafting version 4.0 of its license set. Freeculture.org is urging CC to remove the NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND) clauses from the new version. "Neither of them provide better protection against misappropriation than free culture licenses. The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing derivatives are either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses. The NC clause is vague and survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders’ fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use? Where is the line drawn between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn’t. It does not increase the potential profit from work and it does not provide any better protection than than Copyleft does (using the ShareAlike clause on its own, which is a free culture license)."

Comments (47 posted)

There's a Verdict in Apple v. Samsung (Groklaw)

Groklaw has the details and a lot of pointers to further coverage on Apple's victory in its suit against Samsung. "This is definitely not the end of this story. It can't be. It's preposterous."

Comments (55 posted)

Kügler: Best practises for writing defensive publications

On his blog, Sebastian Kügler gathers some tips on writing defensive publications. These publications are a weapon that can be used to ensure that techniques used by free software don't get patented by others. "A defensive publication is a technical document that describes ideas, methods or inventions and is a form of explicit prior art. Defensive publications are published by Open Invention Network in a database that is searched by patent offices during a patent exam. A good defensive publication will prevent software patents from being granted on ideas that are not new and inventive.These will help protect your freedom to operate. "

Comments (5 posted)

Twitter Joining the Linux Foundation (TechCrunch)

Scott Merrill at TechCrunch reports that Twitter is set to join the Linux Foundation. The formal announcement will be at LinuxCon North America next week, where Twitter's Manager of Open Source, Chris Aniszczyk, will be presenting a keynote address. Also joining Inktank (makers of the Ceph distributed filesystem) and hardware vendor Servergy.

Comments (1 posted)

Does anyone want Linux.conf.au 2014? (TechRepublic)

TechRepublic reports that there have been no bids for LCA 2014. "“We should now be in the final stages of meeting with bid teams and visiting the proposed venues, ready to make a decision in the next few weeks. This task turns out to be trivially simple, because to date, we have not received any bids,” James Polley, Linux Australia executive council member, wrote on the Linux Australia mailing list."

Comments (5 posted)

PyCon UA 2012 - Call for Speakers

PyCon Ukraine will take place October 20-21 in Kyiv, Ukraine. The proposal deadline is September 30.

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HelloGcc 2012 Workshop

The HelloGcc 2012 Workshop will take place in Beijing, China on November 10. The call for topic speakers is open. "Every year, we hold a technical workshop in order to improve communication among open source developers and fans. The activity will be held on Nov. 10th this year. We're calling for topic speakers now. As soon as you prefer to give a technical report, welcome to contact us."

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Strata Conference CfP

The O'Reilly Strata Conference will take place February 26-28, 2013 in Santa Clara, California. The call for proposals closes September 20.

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LPI Hosts Exam Labs at SUSECon 2012

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) will offer all of its LPIC certification exams at SUSECon, September 18-21, 2012 in Orlando, Florida.

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Kernel Recipes, a kernel-focused event

Kernel Recipes Paris 2012 will take place in Paris, France on September 21. "The aim of the day is to provide information, exchange, demonstrations in a privileged setting. The topics will be related to the coming news, the process of release of the kernel and its issues, problems and hardware support relationships with manufacturers, security."

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LCA2013 Community Miniconfs Announced

linux.conf.au has announced a second set of mini-conferences at the 2013 LCA (January 28-February 2, 2013 in Canberra, Australia). "Community is one of the most important and noticeable aspects of open source development. Without the open source community, there is no open source. At linux.conf.au, the community miniconfs are aimed at bringing like-minded people together to discuss the things they're passionate about."

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Events: August 30, 2012 to October 29, 2012

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
August 28 August 30	Ubuntu Developer Week	IRC
August 29 August 31	2012 Linux Plumbers Conference	San Diego, CA, USA
August 29 August 31	LinuxCon North America	San Diego, CA, USA
August 30 August 31	Linux Security Summit	San Diego, CA, USA
August 31 September 2	Electromagnetic Field	Milton Keynes, UK
September 1 September 2	Kiwi PyCon 2012	Dunedin, New Zealand
September 1 September 2	VideoLAN Dev Days 2012	Paris, France
September 1	Panel Discussion Indonesia Linux Conference 2012	Malang, Indonesia
September 3 September 8	DjangoCon US	Washington, DC, USA
September 3 September 4	Foundations of Open Media Standards and Software	Paris, France
September 4 September 5	Magnolia Conference 2012	Basel, Switzerland
September 8 September 9	Hardening Server Indonesia Linux Conference 2012	Malang, Indonesia
September 10 September 13	International Conference on Open Source Systems	Hammamet, Tunisia
September 14 September 16	Debian Bug Squashing Party	Berlin, Germany
September 14 September 21	Debian FTPMaster sprint	Fulda, Germany
September 14 September 16	KPLI Meeting Indonesia Linux Conference 2012	Malang, Indonesia
September 15 September 16	Bitcoin Conference	London, UK
September 15 September 16	PyTexas 2012	College Station, TX, USA
September 17 September 19	Postgres Open	Chicago, IL, USA
September 17 September 20	SNIA Storage Developers' Conference	Santa Clara, CA, USA
September 18 September 21	SUSECon	Orlando, Florida, US
September 19 September 20	Automotive Linux Summit 2012	Gaydon/Warwickshire, UK
September 19 September 21	2012 X.Org Developer Conference	Nürnberg, Germany
September 21	Kernel Recipes	Paris, France
September 21 September 23	openSUSE Summit	Orlando, FL, USA
September 24 September 25	OpenCms Days	Cologne, Germany
September 24 September 27	GNU Radio Conference	Atlanta, USA
September 27 September 29	YAPC::Asia	Tokyo, Japan
September 27 September 28	PuppetConf	San Francisco, US
September 28 September 30	Ohio LinuxFest 2012	Columbus, OH, USA
September 28 September 30	PyCon India 2012	Bengaluru, India
September 28 October 1	PyCon UK 2012	Coventry, West Midlands, UK
September 28	LPI Forum	Warsaw, Poland
October 2 October 4	Velocity Europe	London, England
October 4 October 5	PyCon South Africa 2012	Cape Town, South Africa
October 5 October 6	T3CON12	Stuttgart, Germany
October 6 October 8	GNOME Boston Summit 2012	Cambridge, MA, USA
October 11 October 12	Korea Linux Forum 2012	Seoul, South Korea
October 12 October 13	Open Source Developer's Conference / France	Paris, France
October 13 October 14	Debian BSP in Alcester (Warwickshire, UK)	Alcester, Warwickshire, UK
October 13 October 14	PyCon Ireland 2012	Dublin, Ireland
October 13 October 15	FUDCon:Paris 2012	Paris, France
October 13	2012 Columbus Code Camp	Columbus, OH, USA
October 13 October 14	Debian Bug Squashing Party in Utrecht	Utrecht, Netherlands
October 15 October 18	OpenStack Summit	San Diego, CA, USA
October 15 October 18	Linux Driver Verification Workshop	Amirandes,Heraklion, Crete
October 17 October 19	LibreOffice Conference	Berlin, Germany
October 17 October 19	MonkeySpace	Boston, MA, USA
October 18 October 20	14th Real Time Linux Workshop	Chapel Hill, NC, USA
October 20 October 21	PyCon Ukraine 2012	Kyiv, Ukraine
October 20 October 21	Gentoo miniconf	Prague, Czech Republic
October 20 October 21	PyCarolinas 2012	Chapel Hill, NC, USA
October 20 October 23	openSUSE Conference 2012	Prague, Czech Republic
October 20 October 21	LinuxDays	Prague, Czech Republic
October 22 October 23	PyCon Finland 2012	Espoo, Finland
October 23 October 25	Hack.lu	Dommeldange, Luxembourg
October 23 October 26	PostgreSQL Conference Europe	Prague, Czech Republic
October 25 October 26	Droidcon London	London, UK
October 26 October 27	Firebird Conference 2012	Luxembourg, Luxembourg
October 26 October 28	PyData NYC 2012	New York City, NY, USA
October 27	Central PA Open Source Conference	Harrisburg, PA, USA
October 27 October 28	Technical Dutch Open Source Event	Eindhoven, Netherlands
October 27	pyArkansas 2012	Conway, AR, USA
October 27	Linux Day 2012	Hundreds of cities, Italy

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