Noise

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The first public draft of the multitouch protocol specification – the
description of how the X Window System will work between multitouch input
devices and applications – is available. Lots of low-level detail which
will be of interest to developers who want to develop multitouch-aware
applications. “If you can poke holes into the spec, come up with
use-cases that are not covered or have general questions that aren’t
answered, please point them out. The sooner, the better.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The H has put up a
lengthy look at copyright assignment policies. There may not be much
new here for LWN readers, but it’s a reasonable summary of the
anti-assignment position. “But it isn’t just the paperwork that
causes friction. The code may be released under a copyleft licence, but
once the copyright has been re-assigned, you have surrendered your rights,
and the new owner is able to apply all the toxic conditions and
ramifications that apply to any closed source licence in a simultaneous
release of your code. The developer has the option of forking the code, but
this is not what you are aiming for when you contribute to a free software
project.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The EFF has put up a new page for a project which it calls the SSL observatory. They have spent months collecting information about SSL certificates across the net; as one might expect, they have found some interesting things. Those results are really only available as a set of slides [PDF] for now, but it’s worth a look. It seems there are over 6,000 valid certificates out there for “localhost”…

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The EFF has put up a new page for a project which it calls the SSL observatory. They have spent months collecting information about SSL certificates across the net; as one might expect, they have found some interesting things. Those results are really only available as a set of slides [PDF] for now, but it’s worth a look. It seems there are over 6,000 valid certificates out there for “localhost”…

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 5, 2010 is available.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Debian has updated avahi (denial of
service) and cabextract (code execution).

Ubuntu has updated likewise-open
(fix regression caused by previous update).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The 1.0 release of the Jolicloud netbook-oriented distribution has been announced.
It has various new features which will doubtless appeal to certain classes
of users.
“As you may have seen, we’ve made some changes to the Stream, making
it a more social app-sharing experience. Now, in Jolicloud 1.0, you can
‘like’ apps, which will show up in your Stream. It will also list the app
in your ‘Favorite Apps’. Don’t forget to use this new feature – it’s
helpful for other users to figure out what the most popular apps are in our
growing App Center.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Developers working on Battle For Wesnoth recently held an IRC meeting to
discuss the Apple App Store
port and other situations which make GPL license compliance hard.
“The point was generally agreed that this meeting was about where our
boundaries are, and not specifically about Apple; other platforms we
are considering present similar issues. Android (with AT&T’s apparent
removal of the ‘allow third party apps’ button) and PalmOS were
specifically mentioned as imminent porting targets.” Numerous
proposals can be found in the minutes, but no decisions have yet been made.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The H reports from the Illumos announcement; Illumos will be a all-free downstream derivative of OpenSolaris. “Illumos is endorsed and supported by Nexenta, Joyent, Greenviolet, Belenix, Schillix, Berlios and Everycity in its efforts to create a freely available SunOS derivative. [Garrett] D’Amore emphasises that Illumos is not a fork, but the work being done will empower the community to fork if needed in the future. He believes the project already has the critical mass necessary to sustain the engineering effort needed.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Groklaw has the
latest ruling from Conservancy v. Best Buy. “One of the defendants was
Westinghouse Digital Technologies, LLC, which refused to participate in
discovery. It had applied for a kind of bankruptcy equivalent in
California. Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York has
now granted Software Freedom Conservancy, a wing of Software Freedom Law
Center, triple damages ($90,000) for willful copyright infringement,
lawyer’s fees and costs ($47,865), an injunction against Westinghouse, and
an order requiring Westinghouse to turn over all infringing equipment in
its possession to the plaintiffs, to be donated to charity. So, presumably
a lot of high-def TVs are on their way to charities.” Given that
the defendant is in bankruptcy, one should not hold one’s breath waiting
for those TVs, but, as the article points out, this ruling cannot fail to
get the attention of the other defendants.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

In the context of the IRMOS
European Project (Interactive Real-Time Applications on
Service-Oriented Infrastructures), a new realtime scheduler for Linux
has been developed by the Real-Time
Systems Laboratory of Scuola
Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.
The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of this new
scheduler, describe its features and how it can be
practically used, provide a few details about the implemented
algorithms, and gathering feedback by the community about possible
improvements. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article by
Tomasso Cucinotta and Fabio Checconi, the developers of this scheduler.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Time for yet another MeeGo 1.0 release announcement: this time they have produced the first version of the “in-vehicle infotainment” version of the distribution. “As part of this release, we are including a sample IVI Home Screen and taskbar, using the included Qt framework, and designed with Automotive Center Console HMI requirements in mind. We have also included some automotive specific middleware components and a few sample applications, including sample navigation program (Navit) and a sample dialer application (BT-HFP Dialer) which uses Bluetooth and a paired phone.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The 2.6.27.49,
2.6.32.17,
2.6.33.7, and
2.6.34.2 stable updates are out; they all
have the usual pile of important fixes. 2.6.33.7 is the final 2.6.33
update, so users should be thinking of moving on; Greg suggests 2.6.35,
since 2.6.34 “is not going to be maintained for much longer.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

A distribution’s membership structure plays an important role in its
development; it defines the kind of contributors that
are welcome in the project, it sets expectations of the project towards
its contributors and defines their rights. In the end, this shapes
the project’s ability to recruit new contributors to keep the project
alive and kicking.
This article introduces the existing developer statuses in Debian and
Ubuntu, and defines the — sometimes confusing — jargon
associated with them. Click below (subscribers only) for the debut
article from contributor Raphaël Hertzog.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

A secretive project called Illumos has announced that it will be announcing
its existence on Tuesday, August 3. “A number of the community
leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together
on a new effort called Illumos, and we’re just about ready to fully
disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general
public.” With a name that can’t fail to bring images of the
Illuminati, it must be good…

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Linus has released the 2.6.35 kernel with
no further prepatches after 2.6.35-rc6, as he had suggested might be
possible. The relatively long announcement includes some thoughts on this
development cycle (he’s happy with how it went) and some concerns about the
state of linux-next heading into 2.6.36.

Some headline features in 2.6.35 include receive packet steering and receive flow steering, memory compaction, direct I/O
support for Btrfs, and the usual pile of new drivers. As always, lots of
details can be found on the excellent KernelNewbies 2.6.35 page.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Paul Vixie has posted an
article introducing DNS response policy zones (DNS RPZ), a sort of
blacklist mechanism for domain names. “ISC is not in the business of
identifying good domains or bad domains. We will not be publishing any
reputation data. But, we do publish technical information about protocols
and formats, and we do publish source code. So our role in DNS RPZ will be
to define ‘the spec’ whereby cooperating producers and consumers can
exchange reputation data, and to publish a version of BIND that can
subscribe to such reputation data feeds. This means we will create a market
for DNS reputation but we will not participate directly in that
market.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

It has been more than four years since LWN first reported on the AppArmor security
module 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.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The GNOME and KDE projects have announced that they will be holding a joint desktop summit in Berlin in August, 2011. “The 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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Jono Bacon responds to the GNOME census and the criticisms of Canonical which have followed. “What 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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Reddit has posted an
extensive interview with Richard Stallman. “The
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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

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 the
full report is now available to all. “Why 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.” The report may be downloaded via this
page.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

CentOS has updated lvm2-cluster (C5: local privilege escalation).

Mandriva has updated openldap
(denial of service, possible code execution).

openSUSE has updated firefox (update
to 3.6.8).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Here’s a
report on iTnews saying that Oracle has abruptly shut down a set of
servers used to perform quality assurance on PostgreSQL releases.
“Sun 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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The first of a regular series of Rakudo Star releases has been announced. “Rakudo 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.” It’s built on
the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, the Parrot virtual machine, and an initial
set of library modules.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

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

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The openSUSE project has announced that Jos Poortvliet will be its new
community manager. “Jos 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.’”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The KDE software collection has a new BlueTooth stack called “BlueDevil.” “This 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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Debian has updated xulrunner
(multiple vulnerabilities) and gnupg2
(potential remote code execution).

Red Hat has updated lvm2-cluster (RHEL5: local privilege escalation).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Dave Neary has posted the highlights
of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from.
“While 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.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Gemini Mobile Technologies has sent out a
press release announcing the availability (under the Apache license) of
“Hibari,” a non-relational database, implemented in Erlang. “Hibari
is a database optimized for the highly reliable, highly available storage
of massive data, so-called ‘Big Data.’ Hibari can be used in Cloud
Computing Applications such as web mail, Social Networking Services (SNS),
and other services requiring storage of tera-bytes and peta-bytes of new
daily data.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Thomas Gleixner was recently invited to give the opening keynote at the
20th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems, recently held in Brussels.
He used this opportunity to talk about the disconnect between Linux kernel
development and the academic research community as demonstrated by the
history of realtime extensions to Linux. Now Thomas has written up his
talk, along with some supplemental material and impressions from the
conference, and contributed it to LWN. Click below (subscribers only) for
a detailed look at how practical and academic realtime come together in
Linux as only Thomas can tell it.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The 2010 Kernel Summit will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
November 1 and 2, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers
Conference. The planning process for this year’s summit has begun, and the
program committee is looking for ideas on what should be discussed and who
should be there. “The kernel summit is organized by a program committee, but it could
just as easily said that it is organized by the whole Linux Kernel
development community. Which is to say, its goals are to make Linux
kernel development flow more smoothly, and what we talk about is
driven by the work that is going on in the development community at
large. So to that end, we need your help!”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced that it
has won three exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules as part of
the regular, three-year process. These include cellphone unlocking, fair
use of DVD content, and, happily, liberating locked-down phones. “In
its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright
Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from
installing unapproved programs on iPhones: ‘When one jailbreaks a
smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone
interoperable with an independently created application that has not been
approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating
system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such
interoperability are fair uses.’”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

There are some interesting changes coming for Rawhide users, starting with
the fact that systemd is now the default init
system. The early reports are mostly about dependency issues; it’s not
clear that all that many users have gotten as far as running the new system
yet. “I have tested all this quite extensibly on my machines, but of
course, I am not sure how this will break on other people’s machines. I
sincerely hope I didn’t break anything major with this transition. So please
report bugs and don’t rip off my head because I might have broken your
boot… I didn’t do it on purpose, promised!”

Meanwhile, the Fedora 14 branch is
coming on July 27, with the added twist that the project is
switching its CVS-based system over to git at the same time. For now, they
will be mostly focused on just making it work, but there’s some interesting
ideas for the future: “Later on we will start to explore more interesting
advancements such as automatic patch management with exploded sources,
linking to upstream source repositories, automatic %changelog generation
from git changelogs, or things I haven’t even thought about.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Here is the text of a ruling by the US Court of Appeals in a suit by MGE UPS Systems against General Electric. The court has ruled that simply circumventing technical measures is not, by itself, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “However, MGE advocates too broad a definition of “access;” their interpretation would permit liability under § 1201(a) for accessing a work simply to view it or to use it within the purview of ‘fair use’ permitted under the Copyright Act. Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners.” What this ruling means in the long term – especially for defendants who are not GE – remains to be seen, but it is a step in the right direction.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The LiMo and GNOME Foundations have announced
a new partnership. “Starting immediately, LiMo Foundation will
become a member of GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and GNOME Foundation
will become an Industry Liaison Partner for LiMo Foundation. This
development represents a natural formalization founded upon the significant
use of GNOME Mobile software components within Release 2 and Release 3 of
the LiMo Platform.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Angus Gratton has posted a
survey of GPL compliance across several Android-based tablets, along
with some comments on his findings. “With the exception of Barnes &
Noble’s Nook e-reader, a device that isn’t even really a tablet, I couldn’t
find a single tablet manufacturer who was complying with the minimum of
their legal open source requirements under GNU GPL. Let alone supporting
community development.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Linux Foundation has sent out an announcement stating that the GENIVI
alliance has chosen MeeGo as the base of its “in-vehicle infotainment”
(IVI) platform. “IVI is a rapidly growing and evolving field that encompasses the digital
applications that can be used by all occupants of a vehicle, including
navigation, entertainment, location-based services, and connectivity to
devices, car networks and broadband networks. MeeGo will provide the base
for the upcoming GENIVI Apollo release that will be used by members to
reduce time to market and the cost of IVI development. MeeGo’s platform
contains a Linux base, middleware, and an interface layer that powers these
rich applications.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Linus has released the 2.6.35-rc6 test
kernel. “I actually hope/think that this is going to be the last
-rc. Things have been pretty quiet, and while this -rc has more commits
than -rc5 had, it’s not by a large amount, nor does it look scary to me. So
there doesn’t seem to be any point in dragging out the release any more,
unless we find something new that calls for it.” It contains mostly
fixes, but also a rename of the logical memory block (LMB) subsystem to
“memblock.” See the announcement for the short-form changelog, or the
full changelog for all the details.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Tim Golden has posted a report from the Python Language Summit, recently
held in Birmingham. “The PyPy guys also announced a C API bridging layer which should enable
a range of Python extension modules to work directly with PyPy. This is
only a stepping stone by way of broadening support. Brett [Cannon] suggested that
the Unladen Swallow merge to trunk was waiting for some work to complete
on the JIT compiler and Georg [Brandl], as release manager for 3.2, confirmed that
Unladen Swallow would not be merged before 3.3.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Diana Harrelson, an anthropology graduate student, spent several months
surveying the Fedora community; a draft version of her
report is now available. It looks at contributors’ motivations and
problems they have encountered, and makes a number of recommendations on
how to make the project easier to contribute to. “The key here, and
the large difference between FLOSS development processes and traditional
ones, is that it’s not the act of doing something that needs approval;
instead it’s the result of the action and quality of the work that must be
approved. Again, this is where not only having a mentor program for new
contributors is useful, but also making such a program highly visible,
transparent, and accessible is important.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Debian has updated mlmmj (directory
traversal) and
ncompress (code execution via crafted
archive).

Fedora has updated libpng10 (F12, F13: code execution and denial of service),
python-cjson (F12, F13: buffer overflow), and
w3m (F12: certificate spoofing).

Red Hat has updated thunderbird (RHEL4, RHEL5:
multiple vulnerabilities),
seamonkey (RHEL3-4: multiple
vulnerabilities),
firefox (RHEL4-5: multiple
vulnerabilities), and
java-1.6.0-ibm (RHEL4-5:
“Unspecified vulnerability… allows remote attackers to affect
confidentiality, integrity, and availability via unknown vectors”).

Ubuntu has updated krb5 (denial of
service).

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Google security blog is carrying a manifesto of sorts on how disclosure of security holes should be handled. “So, is the current take on responsible disclosure working to best protect end users in 2010? Not in all cases, no. The emotionally loaded name suggests that it is the most responsible way to conduct vulnerability research – but if we define being responsible as doing whatever it best takes to make end users safer, we will find a disconnect. We’ve seen an increase in vendors invoking the principles of ‘responsible’ disclosure to delay fixing vulnerabilities indefinitely, sometimes for years; in that timeframe, these flaws are often rediscovered and used by rogue parties using the same tools and methodologies used by ethical researchers. The important implication of referring to this process as ‘responsible’ is that researchers who do not comply are seen as behaving improperly. However, the inverse situation is often true: it can be irresponsible to permit a flaw to remain live for such an extended period of time.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

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The Linux scheduler, in both the mainline and realtime versions, provides a
couple of scheduling classes for realtime tasks. These classes
implement the classic POSIX priority-based semantics, wherein the
highest-priority runnable task is guaranteed to have access to the CPU.
While this scheduler works as advertised, priority-based scheduling has a
number of problems and has not been the focus of realtime research for some
time. Cool schedulers in this century are based on deadlines instead.
Linux does not yet have a deadline scheduler, though there is one in the works. A
recent discussion on implementing the full deadline model has shown, once
again, just how complex it can be to get deadline scheduling right in the
real world.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The OpenStack project has announced
its existence; its goal is to create a free (Apache 2.0), scalable
infrastructure
for cloud computing. “Today, OpenStack consists of two projects. The
first is a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace’s Cloud Files
offering called ‘OpenStack Object Storage’. The code is available today at
OpenStack.org. The second piece is a scalable compute-provisioning engine
based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers
offering called ‘OpenStack Compute.’ Developers can download components of
OS Compute beginning today at OpenStack.org. The first release is expected
to be available later this year.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Here’s a Groklaw
article on the update to the Mozilla Public License and license updates
in general. “What I’m trying to express is simply this: it’s time to
seriously focus on license drafting. The purpose of lawyers is to protect
your interests, to draft language that looks down the road a piece and
tries to head off troubles. I think after SCO and the toy train case, we
can assume there will be troubles. It would be derelict not to let the
lawyers do what they do best and protect us. I know what some of you are
feeling right now: sad. I feel it too. The community was built on trust,
and I’m saying that now it can’t be like that totally any more.”

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the
Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the
list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel
and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has
mostly been solved – for desktop systems. The situation in the
fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in
recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next
big problem to be solved. Subscribers can click below for a look at this issue from this week’s edition.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of
those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to
the “official” repository. There are many maintainers looking after
various subsystems, but every patch they merge must eventually be accepted
by Linus Torvalds if it is to get into the mainline. Linus’s unique role
affects the process in a number of ways; for example, as this article is
being written, Linus has just returned from a vacation which resulted in
nothing going into the mainline
for a couple of weeks. There are more serious concerns associated with the
single-committer model, though, with scalability
being near the top of the list. Click below (subscribers only) for the
full article.

This post was syndicated from: LWN.net and was written by: corbet. Original post: at LWN.net

The Shotwell
0.6.1 release is out. Shotwell is a photo management application; LWN
reviewed it in June. The
biggest changes include support for raw images, the ability to zoom images,
and an “open in external application” feature.