Announcements

Fedora: A Case Study of Design in a FLOSS Community

Máirín Duffy will be presenting a paper on design in the free software community at the upcoming ACM SIGCHI conference. That paper has been posted as a 12-page PDF file, and she is looking for feedback. It's an interesting read from somebody who has been very effective at getting things done in that environment. "Contributors in FLOSS projects, among whom the majority are volunteers, come to the project with different and sometimes conflicting visions and goals. The absence of a central driving vision is challenging to a designer. It is necessary in design practice to balance the needs and requirements of different stakeholders, but it can be substantially more difficult to do so in a FLOSS project where the very goals of the entire project itself may not be agreed upon."

Comments (19 posted)

Mueller: IBM breaks the taboo and betrays its promise to the FOSS community

Florian Mueller writes about the dispute between IBM and TurboHercules SAS; TurboHercules is trying to commercialize an open-source emulator for IBM's mainframe systems. "To add insult to injury, the list of patents with which IBM tries to intimidate the Hercules project even includes two of the 500 patents IBM originally 'pledged' to the open source community. Patent numbers U.S. 5613086 and U.S. 5220669 appear on page 4 of IBM's 2005 'patent pledge', and also appear as patents #83 and #106 in the letter IBM sent to TurboHercules. This betrayal of the promise is unbelievable, but I never believed that IBM was sincere about that pledge in the first place."

A Scribd link to IBM's patent-threat letter is provided in the article, but it can be read without Flash on this page. It's worth noting that TurboHercules has been involving the lawyers on its side as well.

Comments (15 posted)

IBM Denies Breaking Its Open Source Promise (eWeek)

Here's an eWeek article about the battle of words between IBM and TurboHercules. "In response to a query from eWEEK, IBM issued the following statement: 'IBM sent TurboHercules a non-exhaustive list of patents that pertain to our mainframe technology. We did not make any explicit assertions or claims that TurboHercules had violated them. We were merely responding to TurboHercules' surprise that IBM had intellectual property rights on a platform we've been developing for more than 40 years. We stand behind the pledge we made in 2005, and also our rights to protect our significant investments in mainframe technology.'"

Comments (11 posted)

Five open source alternatives to the iPad (opensource.com)

Opensource.com briefly looks at iPad alternatives, which provide a less locked-down experience than the new tablet from Apple. Several are not yet for sale—or are theoretical like the Google tablet—but they start to give an idea of what will be coming in the free-software-based tablet world. "A 2-pound tablet for 300-400€ with a Linux OS designed specifically for a touchscreen with usability in mind. That's the completely open source iFreeTablet developed at the University of Cordoba in Spain. And you get the Flash support and multitasking you can only dream of with that shiny iPad. It's biggest shortcoming is the mere 2.5 hour battery life."

Comments (14 posted)

Emacs & the birth of the GPL (The H)

The H delves into the history of emacs and the GPL. "Emacs has become emblematic of Lisp, Unix and free software, but was originally written by Richard Stallman, with contributions from Guy Steele, Dave Moon, Richard Greenblatt and Charles Frankston, as an extension to the TECO editor on MIT's AI Lab Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) which ran on PDP-6 and PDP-10 machines, somewhere around 1974."

Comments (17 posted)

People of Lava Want to Put a Big Android in Your Living Room (TechNewsWorld)

TechNewsWorld takes a look at an Android powered television. "The much-anticipated "Google TV" may be in the works, but a Swedish company has already won the race to the proverbial finish line with the world's first Android-based TV. Due to hit stores this fall, People of Lava's Scandinavia is a fully interactive Internet TV that combines the functionality of an Android smartphone with that of a high-end, full-HD LED TV set, according to the company."

Comments (1 posted)

CE Linux Forum Newsletter: March 2010

The March 2010 CE Linux Forum Newsletter covers ELC 2010 Program Highlights Update, CELF Architecture Group Project Proposals - Evaluation in Progress, 32nd Japan Technical Jamboree Report, ARM Device Tree Work, and -ffunction-sections Work.

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QA with IBM's Dan Frye: "Everything Has Changed" (Linux.com)

Linux.com has an interview with IBM's Dan Frye as a prelude to his upcoming keynote at the Collaboration Summit. In the interview he talks about how things have changed since IBM joined the Linux community over ten years ago along with some thoughts on where Linux goes from here. "Linux plays a significant role in IBM's smarter planet initiative. As the world becomes more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, Linux will be a fundamental element of most cloud infrastructures in the future because of the same characteristics that have drawn customers to Linux over the last decade. The open nature of Linux and its ability to run on a wide variety of platforms is ideal for spanning an enterprise and virtualizing the aggregated computing resources. This capability makes it an ideal building block for a smarter planet."

Comments (none posted)

QA with Parallels CEO: Prioritizing Kernel-Level Contributions (Linux.com)

Linux.com has an interview with Serguei Beloussov, CEO of Parallels. "Parallels is joining The Linux Foundation today and speaking at the Collaboration Summit next week. Why are you investing in these activities? Beloussov: Since Parallels was founded in 2000, we have been a strong contributor and supporter of Linux - in fact we did not support any other platforms until 2005. Parallels enables its partners to become profitable providers of cloud services. This space - of traditional hosting and cloud services providers for small businesses - has always been dominated by Linux and it's not a coincidence. Delivering profitable cloud service requires a number of capabilities where Linux and Open Source have traditionally been strong - cost structure, flexibility, scale, etc."

Comments (2 posted)

PyCon Australia Call For Proposals

PyCon Australia will take place June 26-27, 2010 in Sydney. The deadline for proposal submission is the 29th of April. "We are looking for proposals for Talks on all aspects of Python programming from novice to advanced levels; applications and frameworks, or how you have been involved in introducing Python into your organisation."

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Registration for LVEE 2010 is open

The sixth international conference of developers and users of free software "Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe" (LVEE 2010) will take place in Belarus on July 1-4, 2010. The call for participation is open until June 12, 2010. Abstracts of reports are due by May 24, 2010.

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Hack.lu 2010 CfP

The hack.lu 2010 security conference will be held in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg, October 27-29, 2010. The call for papers is open until June 1, 2010.

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O'Reilly Open Source Convention Reveals Program and Opens Registration

OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, will be held in Portland, Oregon July 19-23, 2010. Program chairs Allison Randal and Edd Dumbill have announced the program, and registration has opened. Early registration discounts apply until June 2, 2010.

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Events: April 15, 2010 to June 14, 2010

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

Date(s)	Event	Location
April 12 April 15	MySQL Conference & Expo 2010	Santa Clara, CA, USA
April 14 April 16	Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit	San Francisco, USA
April 14 April 16	Lustre User Group 2010	Aptos, California, USA
April 16 April 17	R/Finance 2010 Conference - 2nd Annual	Chicago, IL, US
April 16	Drizzle Developer Day	Santa Clara, CA, United States
April 23 April 25	FOSS Nigeria 2010	Kano, Nigeria
April 23 April 25	QuahogCon 2010	Providence, RI, USA
April 24 April 25	OSDC.TW 2010	Taipei, Taiwan
April 24 April 25	BarCamb 3	Cambridge, UK
April 24	Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre	Many, Many
April 24 April 25	Fosscomm 2010	Thessaloniki, Greece
April 24 April 25	LinuxFest Northwest	Bellingham WA, USA
April 24	Open Knowledge Conference 2010	London, UK
April 24 April 26	First International Workshop on Free/Open Source Software Technologies	Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
April 25 April 29	Interop Las Vegas	Las Vegas, NV, USA
April 28 April 29	Xen Summit North America at AMD	Sunnyvale, CA, USA
April 29	Patents and Free and Open Source Software	Boulder, CO, USA
May 1 May 2	OggCamp	Liverpool, England
May 1 May 4	Linux Audio Conference	Utrecht, NL
May 1 May 2	Devops Down Under	Sydney, Australia
May 3 May 7	SambaXP 2010	Göttingen, Germany
May 3 May 6	Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 6	NLUUG spring conference: System Administration	Ede, The Netherlands
May 7 May 9	Pycon Italy	Firenze, Italy
May 7 May 8	Professional IT Community Conference	New Brunswick, NJ, USA
May 10 May 14	Ubuntu Developer Summit	Brussels, Belgium
May 17 May 21	Fourth African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons	Accra, Ghana
May 18 May 21	PostgreSQL Conference for Users and Developers	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
May 24 May 25	Netbook Summit	San Francisco, CA, USA
May 24 May 30	Plone Symposium East 2010	State College, PA, USA
May 24 May 26	DjangoCon Europe	Berlin, Germany
May 27 May 30	Libre Graphics Meeting	Brussels, Belgium
June 1 June 4	Open Source Bridge	Portland, Oregon, USA
June 3 June 4	Athens IT Security Conference	Athens, Greece
June 7 June 10	RailsConf 2010	Baltimore, MD, USA
June 7 June 9	German Perl Workshop 2010	Schorndorf, Germany
June 9 June 12	LinuxTag	Berlin, Germany
June 9 June 11	PyCon Asia Pacific 2010	Singapore, Singapore
June 10 June 11	Mini-DebConf at LinuxTag 2010	Berlin, Germany
June 12 June 13	SouthEast Linux Fest	Spartanburg, SC, USA

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