Debian & SFC Tout Copyright Aggregation Project as Debian turns 22
The Debian Project and the Software Freedom Conservancy today announced the creation of the Debian Copyright Aggregation Project. The project protects contributors' code by enforcing the license as necessary. This announcement comes as contributors descend upon DebConf15 and Debianites worldwide celebrate Debian's twenty-second birthday. In other Linux news, Sabayon posted on their development this year and Gary Newell wondered if there is life for Enlightenment now they've been dumped by Bodhi.
Debian and the Software Freedom Conservancy today announced the Conservancy's Debian Copyright Aggregation Project bringing Debian and its contributors under the protection and stewardship of SFC. The announcement stated this comes at the request of Debian contributors and offers to those who choose "license consulting, advice, and compliance services." Bradley Kuhn, President SFC, today blogged that the new project will "assure that a well-equipped organization can enforce copyleft licenses, but also the organization can handle future relicensing requests and cooperate with other Free Software communities who need license exceptions." Kuhn said that copyrights are a privilege, but one that comes also as a burden and that's where the new project comes in. "On behalf of the Debian community, Conservancy can now safeguard the long term interests of Debian and its commitment to software freedom."
The announcement came during Kuhn's keynote at DebConf15 Saturday, August 15 which kicked off in Heidelberg and included a full day of Debian talks. These included Raphaël Hertzog's success story of the Long Term Support Team and Daniel Pocock's ethics talk on Debian in free communication. Debian's birthday party kicked off after the last talk around 9:30 CEST followed by a concert by bellsparx. The remaining week is chocked full of mini-conferences, talks, and presentations and officially concludes Saturday evening August 22 with a closing ceremony in Heidelberg. Debian's official birthday is observed August 16 each year. Debian was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock and named for ex-wife Debbie and himself. Avishek Kumar has a nice summary.
Joost Ruis today posted on some of the changes at Sabayon Linux this year. He wrote of the Docker images that are pulled from Gentoo and have added Sabayon overlay and Entropy to rebuild a "squashed" image from Sabayon's packages. The technical aspects that achieve this process is also conducive to other spins which is why the MATE spin and ARM support is being officially reinstated. Other changes include replacing the Anaconda installer with Calamares. "At the moment Calamares still lacks some features, like disk-encryption, but we expect them to be implemented sooner or later." Plasma 5 is available through community packages and the Sabayon project welcomed two new developers.
Gary Newell, Linux blogger, today pondered the future of Enlightenment without Bodhi, now that Bodhi has decided to fork Enlightenment and call it Moksha. Newell said Enlightenment wasn't really used that many distributions, as default anyway, and many package repositories are woefully out of date. Newell wrote, "the biggest issue I have with it is the lack of documentation, especially user documentation. There are so many features that have little to no clarity as to what their intended uses are." He said he's going to be testing out some distributions' implementations in the coming weeks but concluded, "I worry that without a distribution providing a focus for Enlightenment that it may fade into obscurity."
In other Linux news:
* Best Lightweight Linux Distros
* The 9 Best Linux Distros (slideshow)
* Ubuntu vs Mint: Which one is better?
* Exploring a different direction with VectorLinux 7.1
* Which Open Source Linux Distributions Would Presidential Hopefuls Run?