Linux Action News 24

chris — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 16:55:23 +0000

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Samsung enable Linux on their phones — Linux desktops will become available if users plug their phones into the DeX Station, the device that lets a Galaxy 8 run a Samsung-created desktop-like environment when connected to the DeX and an external monitor
Purism Now Shipping Their Laptops With Intel ME Disabled — Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled.
Purism partner with Nextcloud on end-to-end encrypted storage — Purism plans to include Nextcloud in the Librem 5 phone, as well as within PureOS for its Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops. Additionally, Purism will be discussing with Nextcloud about a future Purism NAS that runs completely free software including Nextcloud and services.
LVFS/fwupd need donations — At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.
Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement — It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years — actual compliance.
Ubuntu 17.10 released — Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including
a new 4.13-based kernel, glibc 2.26, gcc 7.2, and much more.
Ubuntu Desktop has had a major overhaul, with the switch from Unity as
our default desktop to GNOME3 and gnome-shell.
Happy 13th Birthday — Ubuntu 4.10 ‘Warty Warthog’ wasn’t the most glamorous looking release, but it offered open-source enthusiasts of the day a simple, straightforward install from a single CD. The distro was notable for trying to “detect as much hardware as possible, simplifying the X install.”
GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 were among the software assembled for the formative release.
Ubuntu MATE — After six months of tireless work we present Ubuntu MATE 17.10, by far the best release we’ve ever produced.
Xubuntu — Accelerated video playback with Intel hardware should now work more reliably out of the box.

The post Linux Action News 24 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Ubuntu’s New Era | LINUX Unplugged 219

chris — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 19:19:35 +0000

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Follow Up / Catch Up

Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement

To help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation_has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again.

As Greg always says every year, the kernel continues to change faster this year than the last, this year we were running around 8.5 changes an hour, with 10,000 lines of code added, 2,000 modified, and 2,500 lines removed every hour of every day.

Unfortunately the same processes that we use to assure fulfillment of license obligations and availability of source code can also be used unjustly in trolling activities to extract personal monetary rewards. In particular, issues have arisen as a developer from the Netfilter community, Patrick McHardy, has sought to enforce his copyright claims in secret and for large sums of money by threatening or engaging in litigation.

Some of his compliance claims are issues that should and could easily be resolved. However, he has also made claims based on ambiguities in the GPL-2.0 that no one in our community has ever considered part of compliance.

Examples of these claims have been distributing over-the-air firmware, requiring a cell phone maker to deliver a paper copy of source code offer letter; claiming the source code server must be setup with a download speed as fast as the binary server based on the “equivalent access” language of Section 3; requiring the GPL-2.0 to be delivered in a local language; and many others.

Because of this, and to help clarify what the majority of Linux kernel community members feel is the correct way to enforce our license, the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation has worked together with lawyers in our community, individual developers, and many companies that participate in the development of, and rely on Linux, to draft a Kernel Enforcement Statement to help address both this specific issue we are facing today, and to help prevent any future issues like this from happening again.

It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years – actual compliance.

Further Reading:

Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement FAQ – Linux Kernel Monkey Log

Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means, here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers.

Patrick McHardy and copyright profiteering | Opensource.com

Many developers in the Linux community have concerns about the activities of Patrick McHardy. Here are answers to common questions.

Conservancy Applauds Linux Community’s Promotion of Principled Copyleft Enforcement – Software Freedom Conservancy

Software Freedom Conservancy congratulates the Linux community for taking steps today to promote principled, community-minded copyleft enforcement by publishing the Linux Kernel Enforcement Statement. The Statement includes an additional permission under Linux’s license, the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 (GPLv2).