Announcements
Brief items
Mozilla shutting down Persona
Mozilla has announced that it will be shutting down the persona.org authentication service in November. It has been two years since Persona was "transitioned to community ownership"; now the other shoe has dropped. "Due to low, declining usage, we are reallocating the project’s dedicated, ongoing resources and will shut down the persona.org services that we run. Persona.org and related domains will be taken offline on November 30th, 2016." There is a set of "shutdown guidelines" to help sites still using Persona to transition to something else. (LWN looked at Persona in 2013).
Qt open source licensing changed
The Qt Company has announced changes to the open source licensing and product structure of the Qt cross-platform application development framework. "New versions of Qt will be licensed under a commercial license, GPLv2, GPLv3, and LGPLv3, but no longer under LGPLv2.1. The updated open source licenses better ensure end user freedom when using open source licensed versions of Qt. LGPLv3 explicitly forbids the distribution of closed embedded devices. Distributing software under these terms includes a patent grant to all receivers of the software. Commercial Qt licensing removes these requirements and includes professional technical support from The Qt Company."
FSF: Fill out our survey.
The Free Software Foundation is seeking feedback, suggestions, and visions for the future of the FSF. They are conducting a survey to gather input from the community.
Articles of interest
Top 10 open source legal developments in 2015 (Opensource.com)
Mark Radcliffe writes about important legal developments from 2015, including the first ruling on GPLv3 (in Germany): "In this case, the user cured its breach within the necessary period, but refused to sign a 'cease and desist' declaration which was sought by the plaintiff to ensure that the defendant would have an incentive not to breach the terms of the GPLv3 again. The court ruled that the reinstatement provision in Section 8 did not eliminate the plaintiff's right to a preliminary injunction to prevent further infringements, particularly if the defendant had refused to sign the plaintiff's cease-and-desist declaration."
New Books
EFF: The Boy Who Could Change the World
The Electronic Frontier Foundation introduces the book The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz.
Calls for Presentations
LSF/MM 2016: Call for Proposals
The annual Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit for 2016 will be held April 18-19 in Raleigh, NC. There is a call for agenda proposals that are suitable for cross-track discussion as well as technical subjects for the breakout sessions. The deadline for proposing agenda topics is February 29.CFP Deadlines: January 14, 2016 to March 14, 2016
The following listing of CFP deadlines is taken from the LWN.net CFP Calendar.
| Deadline | Event Dates | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 15 | March 14 March 17 |
Open Networking Summit | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| January 15 | March 10 March 12 |
Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny (Students' Computer Science Festival) | Cracow, Poland |
| January 16 | April 1 | DevOps Italia | Bologna, Italy |
| January 18 | March 18 March 20 |
FOSSASIA 2016 Singapore | Singapore, Singapore |
| January 19 | May 17 May 21 |
PGCon - PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers | Ottawa, Canada |
| January 22 | May 2 May 5 |
FOSS4G North America | Raleigh, NC, USA |
| January 22 | January 22 January 23 |
XenProject - Cloud Innovators Forum | Pasadena, CA, USA |
| January 24 | March 14 March 18 |
CeBIT 2016 Open Source Forum | Hannover, Germany |
| January 24 | March 11 March 13 |
PyCon SK 2016 | Bratislava, Slovakia |
| January 29 | April 20 April 21 |
Vault 2016 | Raleigh, NC, USA |
| February 1 | April 25 April 29 |
OpenStack Summit | Austin, TX, USA |
| February 1 | June 22 June 24 |
USENIX Annual Technical Conference | Denver, CO, USA |
| February 1 | April 4 April 8 |
OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop | Monterey, CA, USA |
| February 2 | March 29 March 31 |
Collaboration Summit | Lake Tahoe, CA, USA |
| February 5 | April 4 April 6 |
Embedded Linux Conference | San Diego, CA, USA |
| February 5 | April 4 April 6 |
OpenIoT Summit | San Diego, CA, USA |
| February 6 | February 12 February 14 |
Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe Winter Edition 2016 | Minsk, Belarus |
| February 8 | April 7 April 8 |
SRECon16 | Santa Clara, CA, USA |
| February 10 | April 23 April 24 |
LinuxFest Northwest | Bellingham, WA, USA |
| February 12 | May 9 May 13 |
ApacheCon North America | Vancouver, Canada |
| February 15 | March 11 March 13 |
Zimowisko Linuksowe TLUG | Puck, Poland |
| February 23 | April 9 April 10 |
OSS Weekend | Bratislava, Slovakia |
| February 28 | April 6 | PostgreSQL and PostGIS, Session #8 | Lyon, France |
| February 28 | May 10 May 12 |
Samba eXPerience 2016 | Berlin, Germany |
| February 28 | April 18 April 19 |
Linux Storage, Filesystem & Memory Management Summit | Raleigh, NC, USA |
| February 28 | June 21 June 22 |
Deutsche OpenStack Tage | Köln, Deutschland |
| February 28 | June 24 June 25 |
Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2016 | Hong Kong, Hong Kong |
| March 1 | April 23 | DevCrowd 2016 | Szczecin, Poland |
| March 6 | July 17 July 24 |
EuroPython 2016 | Bilbao, Spain |
| March 9 | June 1 June 2 |
Apache MesosCon | Denver, CO, USA |
| March 10 | May 14 May 15 |
Open Source Conference Albania | Tirana, Albania |
| March 12 | April 26 | Open Source Day 2016 | Warsaw, Poland |
If the CFP deadline for your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Upcoming Events
SCALE 14X announcements
On Friday January 22 the Bad Voltage team will deliver a live show and the following morning Mark Shuttleworth will give a keynote at SCALE in Pasadena, CA.Events: January 14, 2016 to March 14, 2016
The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
| Date(s) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| January 16 | Bangalore Linux Kernel Meetup | Bangalore, India |
| January 20 January 22 |
O'Reilly Design Conference 2016 | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| January 21 January 22 |
Ubuntu Summit | Pasadena, CA, USA |
| January 21 January 24 |
SCALE 14x - Southern California Linux Expo | Pasadena, CA, USA |
| January 22 January 23 |
XenProject - Cloud Innovators Forum | Pasadena, CA, USA |
| January 25 | Richard Stallman - "A Free Digital Society" | Stockholm, Sweden |
| January 30 January 31 |
Free and Open Source Developers Meeting | Brussels, Belgium |
| February 1 | MINIXCon 2016 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| February 1 | Sysadmin Miniconf | Geelong, Australia |
| February 1 February 5 |
linux.conf.au | Geelong, Australia |
| February 5 February 7 |
DevConf.cz 2016 | Brno, Czech Republic |
| February 10 | The Block Chain Conference | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| February 10 February 12 |
netdev 1.1 | Seville, Spain |
| February 12 February 14 |
Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe Winter Edition 2016 | Minsk, Belarus |
| February 24 February 25 |
AGL Member's Meeting | Tokyo, Japan |
| February 27 | Open Source Days | Copenhagen, Denmark |
| March 1 | Icinga Camp Berlin | Berlin, Germany |
| March 1 March 6 |
Internet Freedom Festival | Valencia, Spain |
| March 8 March 10 |
Fluent 2016 | San Francisco, CA, USA |
| March 9 March 11 |
18th German Perl Workshop | Nürnberg, Germany |
| March 10 March 12 |
Studencki Festiwal Informatyczny (Students' Computer Science Festival) | Cracow, Poland |
| March 11 March 13 |
PyCon SK 2016 | Bratislava, Slovakia |
| March 11 March 13 |
Zimowisko Linuksowe TLUG | Puck, Poland |
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol