Announcements
Brief items
LG acquires webOS from HP
LG and HP have announced that LG has acquired the webOS system, including source code, patents, "engineering talent," and more. LG will be taking over the Open webOS and Enyo open-source projects; there is no indication of how enthusiastically the company will support those projects, though.Mozilla announces 18 carriers supporting Firefox OS
Mozilla has announced that eighteen carriers have "committed" to Firefox OS. "The breadth of operators now backing Mozilla’s Firefox OS demonstrates significant industry support for a fully-adaptable, unconstrained mobile platform.The first wave of Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Additional markets will be announced soon." Handsets will be made by Alcatel, Huawei, LG, and ZTE.
The 2013 "State of X.Org" report
The X.Org secretary has posted the annual report on the state of the X.Org Foundation. "The Wayland project gained some momentum in 2012. The Board has agreed that supporting Wayland, Mesa, and other affiliated X.Org projects is a high priority. Some envision a Wayland-based future for open source graphical infrastructure; the Board's role is to ensure that open source graphical environments have a healthy future, whatever technical direction the community chooses to pursue."
Articles of interest
EFF: Open Letter to House Judiciary - Investigate Patent Trolls
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has written an open letter to the US House Committee on the Judiciary asking for relief from patent trolls. "The letter expresses the coalition's support for the SHIELD (Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes) Act, a bipartisan bill from Rep. Peter DeFazio and Rep. Jason Chaffetz that would create real and appropriate consequences for patent lawsuit abuse. Under the Act, if a patent troll loses in court because the patent is found to be invalid or there is no infringement, then the troll pays the other side's legal costs, which often reach into the millions of dollars."
RIP Mark Crispin
Wikipedia's biography on Mark Crispin notes that he passed away last December. "Mark Reed Crispin (born July 19, 1956 in Camden, New Jersey; died December 28, 2012 in Poulsbo, Washington) is best known as the father of the IMAP protocol, having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs; and is the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the mix mail storage format." The news of the illness that led to his death was posted on the imap5 mailing list. (Thanks to Jonathan Abbey)
SCALE 11X: One for the record books
The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) team wraps up another successful event. "Many of the sessions had full attendance, and some were in overflow status. A testament to the quality of the presentations during the course of SCALE 11X is that some of the final presentations on Sunday afternoon were also full." Videos should be available soon.
New Books
Blender Master Class--New from No Starch Press
No Starch Press has released "Blender Master Class" by Ben Simonds.
Education and Certification
LPI: Linux Essentials meets CSTA K-12 standards
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has announced that its Linux Essentials program has met the requirements of the K-12 Computer Science Standards of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). ""Given the educational imperatives that exist today in the United States, this is an important first step to ensure innovative Linux and Open Source technologies are included as part of the regular K-12 curriculum. This will greatly assist educators in their efforts to develop the professional IT workforce of the future. LPI applauds the CSTA on this initiative and is proud to be the first educational resource accepted by the CSTA Curriculum Committee as a resource crosswalk," said Jim Lacey, president and CEO of LPI."
Upcoming Events
Ubuntu Developer Summit To Be Held Online, More Frequently (OMG Ubuntu)
The OMG Ubuntu site reports that the well-regarded Ubuntu Developer Summit is being transformed into an online-only event. "In the age of Google+ hangouts and real-time collaboration the notion of flying people around the world to spend a week in each others company seems antiquated and inefficient."
Update: see this announcement from Jono
Bacon for more information. "With the fantastic level of
interest in the recent phone and tablet announcements, we decided that we
couldn’t wait until May to run this new format for UDS, so the first online
UDS will be taking place next week from 5th - 6th March 2013 from 4pm UTC -
10pm UTC
".
LibrePlanet 2013
LibrePlanet 2013: "Commit Change" takes place March 23-24 in Cambridge, MA. It's gratis for FSF members and discounted for students, but registration is required.FSFE: Document Freedom Day: 2013
The Free Software Foundation Europe will be celebrating Document Freedom Day on March 27. "Document Freedom Day (DFD) campaigns to celebrate information accessibility and introduce non-technical audiences to Open Standards. Open Standards are a basic condition for freedom and choice in software; ensuring the freedom to access data, and the freedom to build Free Software to read and write information. Started in 2008, the campaign last year had 54 events worldwide."
Velocity 2013
Velocity 2013, the O'Reilly Web Performance and Operations Conference, will take place June 18-20 in Santa Clara, California. Registration is open and the program has been announced.Events: February 28, 2013 to April 29, 2013
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| February 25 March 1 |
ConFoo | Montreal, Canada |
| February 26 March 1 |
GUUG Spring Conference 2013 | Frankfurt, Germany |
| February 26 February 28 |
ApacheCon NA 2013 | Portland, Oregon, USA |
| February 26 February 28 |
O’Reilly Strata Conference | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| March 4 March 8 |
LCA13: Linaro Connect Asia | Hong Kong, China |
| March 6 March 8 |
Magnolia Amplify 2013 | Miami, FL, USA |
| March 9 March 10 |
Open Source Days 2013 | Copenhagen, DK |
| March 13 March 21 |
PyCon 2013 | Santa Clara, CA, US |
| March 15 March 17 |
German Perl Workshop | Berlin, Germany |
| March 15 March 16 |
Open Source Conference | Szczecin, Poland |
| March 16 March 17 |
Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2013 | Chemnitz, Germany |
| March 19 March 21 |
FLOSS UK Large Installation Systems Administration | Newcastle-upon-Tyne , UK |
| March 20 March 22 |
Open Source Think Tank | Calistoga, CA, USA |
| March 23 | Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2013 | Augsburg, Germany |
| March 23 March 24 |
LibrePlanet 2013: Commit Change | Cambridge, MA, USA |
| March 25 | Ignite LocationTech Boston | Boston, MA, USA |
| March 30 | NYC Open Tech Conference | Queens, NY, USA |
| March 30 | Emacsconf | London, UK |
| April 1 April 5 |
Scientific Software Engineering Conference | Boulder, CO, USA |
| April 4 April 5 |
Distro Recipes | Paris, France |
| April 4 April 7 |
OsmoDevCon 2013 | Berlin, Germany |
| April 6 April 7 |
international Openmobility conference 2013 | Bratislava, Slovakia |
| April 8 April 9 |
Write The Docs | Portland, OR, USA |
| April 8 | The CentOS Dojo 2013 | Antwerp, Belgium |
| April 10 April 13 |
Libre Graphics Meeting | Madrid, Spain |
| April 10 April 13 |
Evergreen ILS 2013 | Vancouver, Canada |
| April 14 | OpenShift Origin Community Day | Portland, OR, USA |
| April 15 April 17 |
LF Collaboration Summit | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 15 April 18 |
OpenStack Summit | Portland, OR, USA |
| April 15 April 17 |
Open Networking Summit | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 16 April 18 |
Lustre User Group 13 | San Diego, CA, USA |
| April 17 April 18 |
Open Source Data Center Conference | Nuremberg, Germany |
| April 17 April 19 |
IPv6 Summit | Denver, CO, USA |
| April 18 April 19 |
Linux Storage, Filesystem and MM Summit | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| April 19 | Puppet Camp | Nürnberg, Germany |
| April 20 | Grazer Linuxtage | Graz, Austria |
| April 21 April 22 |
Free and Open Source Software COMmunities Meeting 2013 | Athens, Greece |
| April 22 April 25 |
Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 26 April 27 |
Linuxwochen Eisenstadt | Eisenstadt, Austria |
| April 26 | MySQL® & Cloud Database Solutions Day | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| April 27 April 28 |
WordCamp Melbourne 2013 | Melbourne, Australia |
| April 27 April 28 |
LinuxFest Northwest | Bellingham, WA, USA |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol