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LinuxCon Puts Out Call for Papers Ahead of Summer Event
LinuxCon 2010 is just six months away, and the Linux Foundation is on the lookout for attendees and presenters alike. A Call for Participation went out last week, inviting Linux users of all types to submit presentation proposals.
Program options include individual and panel presentations, workgroups, lightning sessions, tutorials, and "birds of a feather" sessions, grouped into three tracks. The Operations track will target architecture, deployment, migration, and other areas of system administration/management, while the Developer track focuses on software engineering, core development, the kernel, and other development. Enterprise, governance, and the open source ecosystem will comprise the Business category.
Oracle Cuts Affect GNOME Accessibility Work
Sun used to boast that it was one of the largest contributors to open source. That's being demonstrated now that Oracle has acquired the company. Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and subsequent layoffs, are having ripple effects on the open source community. The cuts are also hitting the GNOME accessibility (a11y) team and leading the project to think about the future of a11y efforts in GNOME.
Last week Oracle laid off two members of Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO), including GNOME a11y team lead, Willie Walker. Joanmarie Diggs, who works with the team contributing to GNOME's Orca screen reader, says that as a result of the layoffs that "the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail," if Oracle doesn't reverse its position or if another company doesn't step up to help.
SourceForge Removes "Blanket" Block
After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.
According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:
Layoffs Won't Stop Project Wonderland
Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.
Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum." Nicole Yankelovich, who was project lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the team is pursuing for-profit and not-for-profit options, and things look good:
Mozilla Studying Menu Item Use in Firefox
The Mozilla Labs Test Pilot program is studying the way users interact with the browser's menu bar. The Firefox user experience (UX) team is considering major changes of the menu bar design, at least for versions of Firefox running on "modern versions of Windows."
Mozilla Test Pilot is a Mozilla Labs project to collect "structured user feedback" from Firefox and other Moz Labs technologies. Users work with the program by installing the Test Pilot extension and then users have the option of participating in tests like the Menu Item Usage Study. All tests require user approval and data is anonymized before being sent to Mozilla.
Raising Money for Open Source Projects: How Can We Improve?
One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.
Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.
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