Announcements

Google: Taking a stand on open source and patents

Google has announced an initiative to help protect open source software from patent claims. "Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies."

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Red Hat and Rackspace face down a patent troll

Red Hat and Rackspace Hosting have announced that they have won the dismissal of a patent suit by Uniloc USA. Uniloc was asserting patent #5,892,697, which relates to the handling of floating-point numbers. "In dismissing the case, Chief Judge Leonard Davis found that Uniloc's claim was unpatentable under Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. This is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter."

Update: see Groklaw for analysis and the text of the decision.

Comments (6 posted)

Subsurface mourns Jan Schubert

The Subsurface project mourns the loss of Jan Schubert. "It is with great sadness that we say a final 'Tschüss' to one of our most active and engaging developers. Without Jan, Subsurface would not support the needs of technical divers the way it does today."

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Baker: Celebrating 15 Years of a Better Web

Mitchell Baker looks back at Mozilla's first 15 years and ponders the years to come as well. "In the coming era both the opportunities and threats to the Web are just as big as they were 15 years ago. As the role of data grows and device capabilities expand, the Internet will become an even more central part of our lives. The need for individuals to have some control over how this works and what we experience is fundamental. Mozilla can — and must — play a key role again. We have the vision, the products and the technology to do this. We know how to enable people to participate, both by contributing to our specific activities and coming up with their own ideas that advance the bigger cause of enriching the Web."

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Free Software Supporter -- Issue 60

The March edition of the Free Software Foundation's newsletter is out. Topics include Hollyweb, LibrePlanet, Google and instant messaging, unlocking cell phones, an interview with Adam Hyde, Free Software Award winners, the DRM-free label, Document Freedom Day, Trisquel, and more.

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FSFE: How to break free from Skype

The Free Software Foundation Europe notes that Microsoft will discontinue its Windows Messenger service and switch current users to Skype. "The Free Software Foundation Europe advises former users of Windows Messenger to take this as an opportunity to embrace Open Standards such as Jabber (XMPP) instead of switching to Skype."

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How crowdfunding and the JOBS Act will shape open source companies (O'Reilly)

This O'Reilly Radar post makes the case that upcoming changes in how shares of companies can be sold in the US will facilitate the creation of a new flood of open-source companies. "Now, open source projects will be able to seek and find crowds of investors from within their own communities. These companies will have both the traditional advantages of proprietary companies (well-capitalized companies recruit armies of competent programmers and sales forces that can survive long sales cycles) and the advantages of the open source development model (open code review and the ability to integrate the insights of outsiders)."

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Call for papers for Dyla'13

Dyla'13, the 7th Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications, will take place July 1-5 in Montpellier, France. The submission deadline is April 19.

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GUADEC 2013 Call for Presentations

The GNOME Users and Developers Conference GUADEC will take place August 1-8, in Brno, Czech Republic. The call for presentations is open until April 27.

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Extended CfP at PyCon SG 2013

PyCon SG will take place June 13-15 in Singapore. The call for proposals, presentations and tutorials has been extended until April 30.

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openSUSE Conference 2013 Call for Papers

The openSUSE Conference takes place July 18-22 in Thessaloniki, Greece. The CfP deadline has been extended to June 17 or until all slots are filled.

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PyCon Australia 2013 Early Bird registration

Early bird registration for PyCon Australia is open. PyCon AU takes place July 5-7 in Hobart, Tasmania. Early bird registration will be extended to the first 80 confirmed conference registrations, or until May 3, whichever comes first.

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PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2013

PGConf.EU 2013 will be held October 29-November 1 in Dublin, Ireland. "The format will be the same as previous years - one day of training before the main event consisting of three days fully packed with sessions about PostgreSQL."

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Events: April 4, 2013 to June 3, 2013

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
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
April 29 April 30	2013 European LLVM Conference	Paris, France
April 29 April 30	Open Source Business Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 1 May 3	DConf 2013	Menlo Park, CA, USA
May 2 May 4	Linuxwochen Wien 2013	Wien, Austria
May 9 May 12	Linux Audio Conference 2013	Graz, Austria
May 10	CentOS Dojo, Phoenix	Phoenix, AZ, USA
May 10	Open Source Community Summit	Washington, DC, USA
May 14 May 15	LF Enterprise End User Summit	New York, NY, USA
May 14 May 17	SambaXP 2013	Göttingen, Germany
May 15 May 19	DjangoCon Europe	Warsaw, Poland
May 16	NLUUG Spring Conference 2013	Maarssen, Netherlands
May 22 May 25	LinuxTag 2013	Berlin, Germany
May 22 May 24	Tizen Developer Conference	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 22 May 23	Open IT Summit	Berlin, Germany
May 23 May 24	PGCon 2013	Ottawa, Canada
May 24 May 25	GNOME.Asia Summit 2013	Seoul, Korea
May 27 May 28	Automotive Linux Summit	Tokyo, Japan
May 28 May 29	Solutions Linux, Libres et Open Source	Paris, France
May 29 May 31	Linuxcon Japan 2013	Tokyo, Japan
May 30	Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day	Prague, Czech Republic
May 31 June 1	Texas Linux Festival 2013	Austin, TX, USA
June 1 June 4	European Lisp Symposium	Madrid, Spain
June 1 June 2	Debian/Ubuntu Community Conference Italia 2013	Fermo, Italy

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