OStatic

The Penguin Dinner at the close of the annual linux.conf.au conference is always a demonstration of the open source community's generosity, and this year's event was no exception. This year's charity was Life Flight Trust, an ambulance/rescue helicopter service in Wellington, New Zealand. Attendees at the dinner had the opportunity to bid on the chance to take part in a training mission with Westpac Rescue Helicopter, one of the services provided by Life Flight Trust.

KDE fans are in for a treat today. The KDE Project released its KDE Software Compilation 4.4 today, spot on time and with more than 1,433 new features. The project has also decked out the KDE Website with a fresh new design. Code-named Caikaku, this release brings social media features to Plasma and a brand-new netbook interface for users who dig the tiny notebooks.

The Plasma Netbook is debuting in 4.4.0 as an alternative to the standard Plasma Desktop shell. Specifically designed for small screens, it has a full-screen app launcher and is ready to work with touchscreen devices. It's been in development for some time. The interface features a special newspaper layout that organizes KDE applets (plasmoids) to better make use of limited space.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

If you're fortunate enough to live near New York City, you can catch Eben Moglen at the NY Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-NY) on Friday, talking about Freedom in the Cloud. Specifically, Moglen will be talking about the implications of cloud computing on software freedom, privacy, and security.

Cloud computing does pose quite a few challenges for software freedom. In addition to software licensing, users have to worry about privacy, data portability, and more. Just having the source is no longer enough, when users do have the source. Software freedom in the cloud is possible, however. For example, as this report of a talk by Aaron Williamson of Software Freedom Law Center points out, the Identi.ca microblogging service is an example of how to provide a cloud service and maintain user freedom: