The Little Hacker's Room

There are many good reasons to promote a free software project, but perhaps the biggest is to attract more users and contributors; it's difficult to do anything with an application that you don't know about. But many projects fail to effectively get the word out about their work, which means that it's less likely a community will spring up around it. At both a href=http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale8x/SCALE 8x/a and a href=http://guadec.org/index.php/guadec/indexGUADEC 2010/a, I have had the opportunity to talk about ways that projects can improve their promotional activities and present an organized, interesting look to the rest of the free software world. Hopefully, a summary of the ideas presented will be helpful to the wider community.

It has been more than four years since LWN first a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/181508/reported on the AppArmor security module/a and the opposition to its addition to the mainline. Over that time, there has been much discussion of pathname-based security, the value of having multiple security modules, and more; meanwhile, AppArmor has mostly faded from view. Canonical developer John Johansen has picked up this module, though, and has been working toward its inclusion. The latest what's coming post from security maintainer James Morris (click below) now shows that AppArmor has been queued for the next merge window (the YAMA security module from Canonical is also queued). Unless some last-minute opposition turns up, this should be the end of a long-running story.

The GNOME and KDE projects have a href=http://www.kdenews.org/2010/07/30/desktop-summit-2011-announcedannounced/a that they will be holding a joint desktop summit in Berlin in August, 2011. spanThe 2011 Desktop Summit will build on the first Summit's success. More than 1,000 contributors from more than 50 countries are expected to attend the 2011 event in Berlin. In addition to members of the GNOME and KDE development community, the conference will also attract many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies./span

bDebian/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398167/openldap/a (denial of service). p bFedora/b has updated bkvirc/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398168/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398169/F12/a: remote command execution) and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398170/F12: pidgin/a (denial of service). p bRed Hat/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398166/java/a (multiple vulnerabilities) and bfreetype/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398176/RHEL 3/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398177/RHEL 4amp;5/a: multiple vulnerabilities). p bSUSE/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/398172/firefox, thunderbird, seamonkey/a (multiple vulnerabilities).

Jono Bacon a href=http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/07/30/red-hat-canonical-and-gnome-contributions/responds to the GNOME census/a and the criticisms of Canonical which have followed. spanWhat the report doesn’t take into account are upstream contributions that are built on the GNOME platform but (a) not part of official GNOME modules, and (b) hosted and developed elsewhere, such as Launchpad. As such, while the report is accurate for showing code and contributions accepted into GNOME, there are also many projects built on GNOME technology that are not taken into account due to non-inclusion in GNOME modules or being developed outside of GNOME infrastructure./span

Reddit has posted a href=http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.htmlan extensive interview with Richard Stallman/a. spanThe main shortcoming of Linux is at the level of device support. The obstacle there isn't a lack of ability among Linux developers, but rather the use of devices whose specs are secret. Finishing the HURD would not advance us at all in supporting these devices. The work that is needed is at the driver and firmware level. That's why our high priority task list includes items relating to free drivers, but not the HURD./span

When Dave Neary announced his GNOME Census report, he stated that the full report would only be available to paid customers until October, when it would be released under the CC Attribution-Sharealike license. Things have changed, though, and a href=http://www.neary-consulting.com/index.php/2010/07/29/gnome-census-report-now-available-as-free-download/the full report is now available to all/a. spanWhy the change of heart? My intention was never to make a fortune with the report, my main priority was covering my costs and time spent. And after 24 hours, I've achieved that. I have had several press requests for the full report, and requests from clients to be allowed to use the report both with press and with their clients./span The report may be downloaded via a href=http://www.neary-consulting.com/index.php/services/gnome-census/this page/a.

bCentOS/b has updated blvm2-cluster/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397933/C5/a: local privilege escalation). p bMandriva/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397928/openldap/a (denial of service, possible code execution). p bopenSUSE/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397931/firefox/a (update to 3.6.8).

Here's a href=http://www.itnews.com.au/News/221051%2coracle-shuts-down-open-source-test-servers.aspxa report on iTnews/a saying that Oracle has abruptly shut down a set of servers used to perform quality assurance on PostgreSQL releases. spanSun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system. The development of PostgreSQL had been supported by Sun - which contributed DTrace support, amongst other features to the database platform. At the start of July, Oracle shut down its three PostgreSQL build farm servers without warning, leaving the PostgreSQL community rushing to find replacements./span

The first of a regular series of Rakudo Star releases has been a href=http://rakudo.org/node/75announced/a. spanRakudo Star is aimed at 'early adopters' of Perl 6. We know that it still has some bugs, it is far slower than it ought to be, and there are some advanced pieces of the Perl 6 language specification that aren't implemented yet. But Rakudo Perl 6 in its current form is also proving to be viable (and fun) for developing applications and exploring a great new language. These 'Star' releases are intended to make Perl 6 more widely available to programmers, grow the Perl 6 codebase, and gain additional end-user feedback about the Perl 6 language and Rakudo's implementation of it./span It's built on the Rakudo Perlnbsp;6 compiler, the Parrot virtual machine, and an initial set of library modules.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 29, 2010 is available.

The openSUSE project has announced that Jos Poortvliet will be its new community manager. spanJos commented, 'The opportunity to become part of the international openSUSE community is very exciting. There are a great number of interesting developments going on in the free software world, and openSUSE plays a major role in many of them. I look forward to working with the community on these, helping it grow, finding new directions and ways of developing, and delivering its innovative technologies to users and developers around the world.'/span

The KDE software collection a href=http://www.afiestas.org/bluedevil-the-new-kde-bluetooth-stack-is-here/has a new BlueTooth stack/a called BlueDevil. spanThis release should be stable enough to be used by everybody, but we’re looking specially for advanced users with 'compiling skills' so we can get quick feedback and fix as many bugs as possible./span

bDebian/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397686/xulrunner/a (multiple vulnerabilities) and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397687/gnupg2/a (potential remote code execution). p bRed Hat/b has updated blvm2-cluster/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397688/RHEL5/a: local privilege escalation).

The a href=http://wordpress.orgWordPress/a community witnessed the end of a high-profile war of words last week when the distributor of a popular commercial theme for the blogging platform agreed to license some of his work under the GPL. But was that relicensing really necessary? This article looks at the nature of WordPress themes and why they are considered to be derived works based on WordPress itself.

Dave Neary has posted a href=http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/the highlights of his work/a to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. spanWhile over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors. Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium./span

The much-anticipated release of GNOME 3.0mdash;scheduled for Septembermdash;has been pushed back to March 2011 due to quality issues in the code. The announcement was made at a href=http://guadec.org/index.php/guadec/indexGUADEC/a (GNOME users' and developers' European conference), which is being held July 26-30 in The Hague, Netherlands. There will be a GNOME 2.32 release in September along with GNOME 3 beta. GNOME 2.32 will have the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes along with a new control center design, UPnP, and color management support. The extra time will be used to improve GNOME Accessibility support, GNOME Shell, and documentation for GNOME 3.0. There should be a press release on the a href=http://www.gnome.org/GNOME web site/a before too long, stay tuned.

Channel Register a href=http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/07/27/novell_suse_gallery/reports/a that Novell is launching the SUSE Gallery. spanIt has been a year since Novell launched its SUSE Appliance Program, which offers a set of online tools, dubbed SUSE Studio, for spinning up software appliances based on its SUSE Linux distro. The appliance tools were aimed at software developers who wanted to code appliances for their own purposes - perhaps as a means of more easily supporting and redistributing their own application software to their customers - not for distributing software appliances to the general public. But that is precisely what some software developers want to be able to do, according to Joanna Rosenberg, ISV marketing manager at Novell, and so on the first birthday of the SUSE Appliance Program, Novell is opening up what it calls the SUSE Gallery./span

Free Software Magazine a href=http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/mediawiki_and_script_translation_morevna_projectlooks/a at the use of MediaWiki by the Morevna Project. spanPutting together a collaborative film production involves a lot of bits and pieces. Workflow is unclear at the beginning, and has to be developed organically. That argues against putting too much structure into the software that you use - otherwise it would straightjacket you. Furthermore, when you're working on an artistic project, you don't want to waste time developing (or fixing) software that doesn't work like you need it to. So it makes sense to use something that is well-tested. So, really, MediaWiki is a no-brainer./span (LWN a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/377939/covered/a the Morevna Project last March.) (Thanks to Paul Wise)

bCentOS/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397534/C5: firefox/a (arbitrary code execution), a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397547/C4: seamonkey/a (arbitrary code execution), and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397550/C5: w3m/a (man-in-the-middle attack). p bFedora/b has updated bhorde/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397512/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397513/F12/a: privacy compromise), bimp/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397514/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397515/F12/a: privacy compromise), bopenttd/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397516/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397517/F12/a: denial of service), bmingw32-libpng/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397521/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397522/F12/a: buffer overflow and memory leak), bturba/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397524/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397525/F12/a: cross-site scripting), bxulrunner/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397526/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397527/F12/a: arbitrary code execution), blibvirt/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397528/F13/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397529/F12/a: multiple vulnerabilities), a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397531/F13: pidgin/a (denial of service), a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397532/F13: mysql/a (denial of service), and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397533/F12: cups/a (multiple vulnerabilities). p bMandriva/b has updated bphp/b (a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397535/2008.0, 2009.0, 2009.1, Corporate 4.0, Enterprise Server 5.0/a, a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397551/2010.0, 2010.1/a: multiple vulnerabilities) and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397556/samba/a (multiple vulnerabilities). p bopenSUSE/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397510/bogofilter/a (denial of service) and a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397553/thunderbird/a (multiple vulnerabilities). p bRed Hat/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397536/w3m/a (man-in-the-middle attack). p bUbuntu/b has updated a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/397511/likewise-open/a (unauthorized local access).