Admission is free, but booking is essential. More details are available on the Bath Digital Festival site, which, for those unfamiliar with his decades of work in the field of software and freedoms of various kinds, also has potted biography of rms.
There’ll be a further foretaste of the Ubuntu OS for smartphones with effect from 21st February according to a report on German IT news website Heise since Ubuntu developer Canonical wants to publish its Touch Developer Preview of the mobile operating system then. It is aimed at developers so they can test their applocations with it, as well as users who like to experiment. Besides images for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and LG Nexus 4 smartphones, Canonical also wants to publish the sources with which the operating system can be ported to other smartphones.
An Ubuntu for smartphones wiki page is already online, but will only be filled with additional content on 21st February. Anyone visiting the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona from 25th February can also see the Ubuntu OS on smartphones at the Canonical stand (81D30) in Hall 8.1.
Using Ubuntu for smartphones is heavily based on swipe gestures and dispenses with the usual Android home, back and menu buttons. The final version is provisionally scheduled to ship in the autumn, as was recently announced by Canonical’s founder Mark Shuttleworth.
The Document Foundation, the organisation behind the LibreOffice productivity suite, is celebrating its first birthday as a German charitable foundation.
Florian Effenberger of The Document Foundation has today posted the message below on Google+:
Exactly one year ago, February 17th 2012, The Document Foundation was established as a charitable Foundation under German law (gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts). So far, it has proven to be the ideal entity for reflecting the LibreOffice’s community needs. I am proud and honoured to be part of this project, part of this community, and part of TDF. I would like to thank all of you who have contributed to the success of our common goal – all developers, marketeers, localizers, administrators, designers, testers, donors, adopters, users and everyone else involved. You have made possible what the community has been dreaming of for a decade, and we all can be excited about the future!
I’d like to add my best wishes for the future of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice to those of Florian. Keep up the good work; LibreOffice is a great product without which I wouldn’t be able to work so well. 🙂
Calling all companies using software built using the Python programming language! The use of the term Python for free and open source software is at risk in the EU due to a Community trade mark application. The situation is explained in the following Python Software Foundation News blog post from yesterday.
There is a company in the UK that is trying to trademark the use of the term “Python” for all software, services, servers… pretty much anything having to do with a computer. Specifically, it is the company that got a hold on the python.co.uk domain 13 years ago. At that time we weren’t looking a lot at trademark issues, and so we didn’t get that domain.
This hasn’t been an issue since then because the python.co.uk domain has, for most of its life, just forwarded its traffic on to the parent companies, veber.co.uk and pobox.co.uk. Unfortunately, Veber has decided that they want to start using the name “Python” for their server products.
We contacted the owners of python.co.uk repeatedly and tried to discuss the matter with them. They blew us off and responded by filing the community trademark application claiming the exclusive right to use “Python” for software, servers, and web services – everywhere in Europe.
We got legal counsel in the UK and we (the PSF) are opposing the community trademark application, but our own trademark application hasn’t yet matured. Accordingly, we are going with the trademark rights we have developed through using “Python” consistently over the past 20 years.
According to our London counsel, some of the best pieces of evidence we can submit to the European trademark office are official letters from well-known companies “using PYTHON branded software in various member states of the EU” so that we can “obtain independent witness statements from them attesting to the trade origin significance of the PYTHON mark in connection with the software and related goods/services.” We also need evidence of use throughout the EU.
What can you do?
1. Do you work for a company that uses Python? Are in the EU, do you hire in the EU, or do you have an office in the EU? Could you write a letter on company letterhead that we can forward to our EU counsel?
We would want:
just a brief description of how Python is used at your company how your company looks for and recognizes “Python” as only coming from the PSF, and your view that another company using term Python to refer to services, software, and servers would be confusing.
This doesn’t need to be long – just a couple of paragraphs, but we would want any description of how you use Python for software, web hosting, Internet servers, VPNs, design and development of computer hardware or software, hosting websites, renting servers (like Openstack), or backup services. For those who are interested the specific class descriptions are at the bottom of this message. [1][2]
You can send a PDF copy of the letter to psf-trademarks@python.org
2. Do you have, or know of, anything that was published in the EU and uses “Python” to refer to Python-the-language? Can we get copies, pictures, or scans? This includes:
- Books
- Pamphlets
- Conference programs or talks
- Job listings
- Magazines or other publications
- Prospectuses
You can send a PDF scan of the materials to psf-trademarks@python.org
3. You can also help protect the Python intellectual property with financial support.
Since the costs of a trademark opposition are in the range of tens of thousands of dollars, we will need to find a way to refinance the legal costs of the opposition.
Please consider donating to the Python Software Foundation at:
http://www.python.org/psf/donations/
or get in touch with me directly.This is the first time the PSF has to take legal action to protect Python’s intellectual property. Please do consider helping the PSF in any way you can. The threat is real and can potentially harm your business in Europe, especially if you are in the web hosting business and provide Python as part of your hosting plans.
Please let me know if there are any questions that I can answer. If you know someone who might have this information, please feel free to forward this.
Thanks,
Van Lindberg, Chairman
van@python.org
Python Software Foundation[1] Class 9 – Computer software; Servers for web hosting; VPN [virtual private network] hardware; Internet servers; Internet servers.
[2] Class 42 – Design and development of computer hardware and software; Website hosting services; Hosting computer sites [websites]; Hosting the websites of others; Hosting of websites; Hosting the web sites of others on a computer server for a global computer network; Hosting websites on the Internet; Hosting the web sites of others; Web hosting services; Hosting of digital content, namely, on-line journals and blogs; Application service provider [ASP], namely, hosting computer software applications of others; Website hosting services; Hosting of digital content on the internet; Hosting of web sites; Hosting web sites; Hosting web sites for others; Hosting websites of others; Hosting of internet sites; Hosting the computer sites (web sites) of others; Web site hosting services; Hosting computer sites [web sites]; Hosting web sites of others; Rental of web servers; Servers (rental of web-); Servers (Rental of Web -).
The Document Foundation, the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice office suite, has released version 4.0 suite. Even though the office package has not changed much visually from earlier releases, it includes several underlying improvements such as changes to the API, support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard and better import/export of Microsoft Office file formats.
The new release also includes some changes to the user interface, as well as a new feature – support for Firefox Personas themes (posts passim). An Android application allowing users to control an Impress presentation from a mobile phone is ready to be used with some Linux versions of LibreOffice (posts passim) and is expected to be released soon. LibreOffice developers are also working on bringing the feature to outstanding Linux versions of the suite, as well as its Windows and Mac OS X ports.
LibreOffice 4.0 is available for download Linux, Mac and Windows. Please consult the release notes for full details of changes since the last version release.
Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones.
Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth, according to a presentation given by LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels over the last weekend.
Spanish IT services company ElkarMedia S.L. reports (Spanish) that the municipality of Azpeitia in Spain’s Basque Country will be avoiding the maintenance costs involved in using Microsoft Office and saving up to €30,000-40,000 in 3-4 years since the company installed the free and open source LibreOffice office suite on the council’s computers.
In addition, ElkarMedia also provided training for council employees to enable them to use the new software.
The council has also made the following two decisions:
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports today that a German parliament study group is recommending amendments to budgetary legislation to allow software produced by or for public sector organisations to be released as open source software. Germany’s budget law currently prevents public sector organisations from giving away software for free.
In its report (PDF, German), the Bundestag’s Interoperability, Standards and Free Software group is proposing six measures to promote the uptake of free and open source software by Federal and regional authorities, including resuming funding the currently defunct open source competence centre. This could assist public sector organisations wanting to migrate proprietary to free and open source software. The group is also calling on all public sector organisations to create new software that is “as platform-independent as possible”.
Furthermore, the group, which is chaired by FDP deputy Jimmy Schulz, also wants the Federal government actively to encourage the use of open standards. This would make access to the government easier for both citizens and companies, as well as being an incentive for software development.
LibreOffice developer Jan Holesovsky writes that he has had a late patch included in the LibreOffice 4.0.0 release candidate (posts passim).
The patch in question enables support for Firefox Personas (now better known as lightweight Firefox themes. Ed.) in LibreOffice. Personas are “are easy-to-use themes” that let you personalize the look of your Firefox web browser.
Oliver Hallot, a director of the Document Foundation (the organisation behind LibreOffice. Ed.) thought it would be a good idea to reuse Personas in LibreOffice.
If you’re running LibreOffice 4, to set up Personas, go to Tools > Options > Personalisation > Select Persona. This opens a handy little dialog box, which will launch your web browser. Once you’ve found the Persona you like, you paste its URL (e.g http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/123456) into the appropriate input field, press OK, then OK again in Options and that’s it! Your LibreOffice install will then look similar to the one below.
Today the first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been made available for download for evaluation, quality assurance (QA) testing and the like.
The developers do nevertheless stress that they do not recommend the use of LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. Information about QA testing can be found on the LibreOffice QA testers page.
The developers also suggest reading the release notes.
If you’re interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development, check out the nightly builds. However, these are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and not QA-approved in any way. Caveat emptor.
To download LibreOffice 4.0.0.0 RC1 visit the pre-release page. To download the right package for your particular system, you’ll need to select the right package from the two dropdown lists on the page; there is an automatic detection system to help, but this might not work in all cases. The release candidate is available for GNU/Linux (rpm and deb-based package management systems), Mac OS X (both Intel and PowerPC versions) and Windows.