Free Software Melbourne

April the 21st of 2016

Free Software Melbourne Presents

Free Software Show-and-Tell

and Committee Elections

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Free Software Melbourne

Gnews April 2016

To build your own slides:

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Free Culture

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Bring Snap Packages

• installation of deb packages in Ubuntu will remain unchanged
• Anyone tried installing a conflicting deb/snap?
• more secure than software installed through deb packages?
• Article

NY Bill Would Provide Tax Credit For Open Source Contributors

• "free as in puppy"
• would provide a tax credit of 20% of "expenses associated with the development of open source and free software", up to an annual maximum of $200
• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) provided guidance on factual matters related to open source and free software
• Versions of this bill have been introduced previously, but have not passed
• Article

US Govt Commits To Publish Publicly Financed Software Under FOSS

• by default, publicly financed software will now be deemed as open-source. That's a win
• plenty of exceptions
• encouraged to be retroactively applicable for the existing custom-build software
• Pilot program: at least 20 percent of its newly-developed custom code each year as OSS
• Open Source Software (OSS): Software that can be freely accessed, used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Then refers to https://opensource.org/osd
• PDF
• Article
• Until 11 April 2016 the public can comment the draft

Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation

• open sourcing the Team Explorer Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse
• other Java/Azure tools open sourced
• Blog announce

FSM is now on MediaGoblin

• MediaGoblin site

First MediaGoblin Identi.ca

• MediaGoblin talking to Pump.IO
• Federation at last?
• Announce

Stallman Writes Again

• Article on License Compatibility and Relicensing
• Merging two pieces of software with two different licenses
• Article
• more specific info

PyCon/DjangoCon to be held in Melbourne

• August 12-16 @ Melbourne Convention Centre
• Inaugural Internet of Things mini-conf
• Main Site
• Mailing list

AWS Zombie Apocalypse clause

• Lumberyard Terms of Service say no using for real life stuff
• But all cool in a Zombie Apocalypse... very funny
• article

SCO Is Undeniably and Reliably Dead

• one page agreement between SCO and IBM which calls “for certification of the entry of final judgment on the Court’s orders concerning all of SCO’s claims"
• TLDR: there’s no reason to continue since SCO is bankrupt and the only assets it has left are its claims against IBM
• Article

Russia Switches to Linux.

• Russia is making noises about switching all state owned computers over to linux based machines
• reaction to US companies complying with the embargo against business in Crimea
• Article

ZFS filesystem will be built into Ubuntu 16.04 LTS by default

• built in but not default... comes with warnings
• OpenZFS-based implementation will get official support from Canonical
• Article
• Announce

MAMEis now GNU GPL 2 or later

• After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license
• contact all people that contributed to MAME [...] and get information about desired license
• Announce

Things to do

Document Freedom Day coming up

• March 30 2016
• "people come together and inform themselves about the ever growing importance of Open Standards"
• Official Site

Day against DRM planning begins

• Tuesday, May 3, 2016
• Anti DRM selfie event?
• Official Site

Open media campaign: Put a stop to invasive Stingray surveillance

• Campaign

EFF: Tell the W3C To Protect Researchers Who Investigate Browsers

• "Because of laws like the DMCA" ... "security researchers who reveal flaws in HTML5-compliant browsers will face legal jeopardy"
• "If you're a security researcher and are able to lend your voice, please contact us ... We'll forward your comments to Tim Berners-Lee..."
• Article

Download all the LCA 2016 videos

• Actually... be careful which "LCA2016" videos you download
• YouTube

Netflix Without Borders & My Netflix, My Privacy

• Open Media petitions
• Petition
• Petition

Results: Watching overseas Netflix - what works?

• almost everything still works to some extent
• Choice Article

Co-sign FSF comment on the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions

• US address only
• DMCA anti-circumvention provisions should be repealed
• Petition

Petition (trade minister) Steven Ciobo to stop the TPP.

• Politicians are very sensitive to pressure in their first few weeks on the job, so now's the perfect time to make our voices heard
• Petition

Choice campaign: The devil in the detail of the TPP

• being reviewed by Federal Parliament right now
• Choice campaign

Open Hardware

Road test of The New AMD GPU-PRO Linux Driver On Ubuntu

• "OpenGL 4.5 support" ... and "OpenCL 2.0 support that works"
• Radeon users will be happy... Vulkan 1.0 support! It's there and working
• Article

Wine Makes It Possible To Run Vulkan Windows Programs On Linux

• latest Wine-Staging build allows for Vulkan Windows programs/games to be dynamically translated and run on Linux
• Release
• Article
• Steam on Android?

Ubuntu phone release

• Meizu PRO 5 Ubuntu Edition
• Globally available
• Octo-core processor(s) and 32 or 64GB/s LPDDR4 memory (fast and low power consumption)
• badly written article
• official announce
• Pre Order

Dell’s Skylake XPS 13

• Review

Releases

Unity 5 Ships

• Brings One Click WebGL Export
• "world’s most popular game development tool" ... orly?
• "Mozilla and Unity worked together to find a way to bring content developed in Unity 5 to the Web using only standard compliant APIs and JavaScript"
• Release

KDE Plasma 5.6 Release

• Shinier, slicker, rounder...
• Progress view in task bar
• System icon hover overs improved
• Wayland... maybe: "we still do not recommend using Wayland as a daily driver"
• Release

'Serious Sam 1' Engine Released As Open Source

• engine that we used for Serious Sam Classic: The First Encounter and The Second Encounter
• the source code is very well commented, easy to modify, and there are lots of user generated mods
• Article
• GitHub

GNU Project Introduces Gneural Network AI Package

• it is a very simple feedforward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting, but the development team plans to deliver more advanced features very soon.
• scripting language, discriminant and activation functions, training methods
• entirely developed in C and does not depend on any external library
• Gnu Page

Mozilla's New Servo Browser Will Hit Alpha In June 2016

• What?
• uses browser.html for the browser's UI and Rust for the browser's core
• plausible that Servo might slowly be integrated in Firefox to replace Gecko
• Article

Apache PDFBox Hits 2.0

• open-source Java tool for working with PDF documents
• create new PDF documents, manipulate existing documents, and extract content + sign, print and validate files
• improved extraction & rendering
• Unicode support
• Announce
• Article

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10

• (Almost) complete Ubuntu distro installed with two way file system access
• "bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF binaries running directly in Windows"
• "think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows"
• MicroSoft Announce
• Keynote
• Hands on review
• Article

Microsoft SQL Server on Linux

• Not open source, just binaries.
• "This gives customers choice and reduces the concerns for lock-in"
• Article

GitHub's Atom 1.5 stable release

• Atom is a open-source hackable editor
• Pretty, flexible and 100s of plugins
• article
• get it

Amazon Launches Lumberyard

• Lumberyard is a free (including beer) 3D game engine for building cloud connected, cross-platform games
• integrates twitch video service
• intended VR integration
• game developers can design games which can support massive social communities right out of the gate. So says Amazon.
• Only pay for AWS services you use to run the game on.
• article
• official site

Google Releases ION

• suite of tools relating to OpenGL
• cross-platform
• for building graphical client applications
• Code

Google opens Cloud Vision API

• Not Code base (sozzles)
• Image recognition and classification for your applications
• article
• Website

GCC 6 Release

• Summary fail... lots of improvements, optimisations and targets
• Release

Wine 1.9.4 Released

• more formats in Direct3D 11
• support for font fall backs and color glyphs
• more Windows applications and games (including MinGW installer?!?), as well as various under-the-hood improvements
• Announce

Distros

UbuntuBSD

• Already Looking To Become An Official Ubuntu Flavor
• a fourth Beta build
• Article
• Article
• Download

Rosa Desktop

• KDE desktop that's even more customisable and maybe even cooler
• From Russia with Love
• Rosa is actually a full distro with own Desktop
• Story
• official site

I.T./Networking

View Linux Server Log file in your browser

• Log.io was built on Node.js and Socket.io
• real time logs with multiple views in the same window (watch multiple filtered logs)
• tutorial
• Website

IP's move to use home routers as public WiFi Hotspots

• Juniper estimates 1 in 3 home routers will be used this way by 2017
• way for home accounts to get cheaper plans
• two wifi networks separated by firewall
• article
• Paper

Security & Privacy

TP-Link blocks open source router firmware

• comply with new FCC rule
• FCC wants to limit interference with other devices by preventing user modifications
• in theory, router makers can still allow loading of open source firmware as long as they also deploy controls that prevent devices from operating outside specs
• routers produced on and after June 2, 2016
• Article

White House working with Linux Foundation

• Cybersecurity National Action Plan announced
• Includes collaboration with Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to better secure Internet Utilities such as open-source software, protocols and standards.
• article with links

Google bans Flash

• Marketers have until June 30 to switch to HTML5 ads
• On that date Flash ads will no longer be shown on Adwords or DoubleClick
• On Jan 2, 2017 Flash will be banned from Google Display Network
• Google+ post

Google updating 'Right to be Forgotten'

• Till now only applied to removing results from originating country
• Will now apply to all versions of its search engine.
• It's an EU thing, no good for Australians
• Article

UK Government plans to snoop on your internet history

• The Investigatory Powers Bill would force companies such as Sky, BT, Google and Facebook to keep detailed records of what we do online for a year
• petition

New website blocking in Australia has begun

• Village Roadshow, Hollywood studios move to block piracy website SolarMovie
• ... unless they were using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service
• Article