FOSDEM Team writes "This week-end, the fourth edition of the FOSDEM (Free and Opensource Software Developers' European Meeting) is taking place in Brussels, Belgium. Once more, famous speakers will be present for this 2 days event to talk in the different tracks presented (Linux Kernel, Accessibility, Desktop, Java, Scripting languages and Security); on Saturday evening, the FS Award ceremony will be conducted by Richard Stallman. This year, the introduction talk will be made by Tim O'Reilly and the end talk by Jon Maddog Hall. Don't miss the interviews made by the FOSDEM guys : Hans Reiser, Ian Formanek, Keith Packard, Tim O'Reilly, Robert Love and many others."

blastedtokyo asks: "With all the talk of offshoring and outsourcing, it seems that taking an entrepreneurial route is a great way to take your life out of the hands of overpaid goons and put it squarely in the hands of an underpaid one. Without an organized team of coders, testers, and designers it seems very tough for a single person to get started in anything other than consulting, or selling stuff on eBay. With my background in product design, and my knowledge that my coding skills aren't the greatest, I'd like to find a vendor or team to help develop some software ideas that I've been stewing over for a while. In other words, I've got the business plan, some credit-cards ready to be maxed out, the bitmap-demo and the specs for a few possible projects, but would like to get a team to code up a working prototype suitable to get some initial customer evaluations. Does anyone have experience sourcing such a vendor? How would you interview a firm to know that their staff is easy to work with and competent? Is it possible to do something like this without delays, excessive mis-communications and cost overruns, or is it better to just start hiring contractors, one at a time?"

ptolemu writes "Cringely's latest article discusses a new obfuscation technique currently being researched called PSCP (Program State Code Protection). An informative read that concludes with some interesting insight on the software giants that heavily depend on this kind of technology."

Eric Boutilier writes "Amy Rich has written an excellent Solaris Express (Solaris 10) how-to and general overview. It covers how the program works, using the community web site, and what's new in Solaris Express." Among many new features, the TCP/IP stack has been redesigned, IPv6 support improved, and both NFSv4 and USB 2.0 support added.

PurdueGraphicsMan writes "There's an article over at Yahoo! about the upcoming version of Perl (version 6) and some of the new features (RFC list). From the article: "Although Perl 5's expressions are the most sophisticated available and aspired to by other programming languages, "no one pretends for a moment that they're anything but hideously ugly," said Damian Conway, a core Perl developer and associate professor at Monash University in Australia.""

cuppm writes "Y, Mark Thomas's final year project for his masters degree, is back in active development (outlined here). Here is the email I received: '...Y development is about to start up again. If you are interested in participating, the website is at: http://www.y-windows.org/. There are links to mailing lists there, and you can download the latest development snapshot, which should compile this time :o). I apologise if I did not respond to your email personally. I was on holiday in Japan when the story broke, and by the time I got back I had over 80 emails about the subject, many of them in depth. If you had specific points that you'd like to raise, I suggest re-raising them on the y-devel mailing list.' So for all those who think it's time for a X replacement, here's your shot. And for those X lovers, use Y's extensibility to make it X compatible." See our previous story for more background.

An anonymous reader writes "Some interesting changes took place in the way the Linux kernel is developed and tested. In many ways, the methods used to develop the Linux kernel are much the same today as they were 3 years ago. However, several key changes have improved overall stability as well as quality. This article takes a look behind the scenes at the tools, tests, and techniques -- from revision control and regression testing to bugtracking and list keeping -- that helped make 2.6 a better kernel than any that have come before it." We might as well mention here (again) that a couple of new kernels are out: leif.singer writes "2.6.3 and 2.4.25 are out, fixing another vulnerability in do_mremap()."

Anonymous Coward writes "XFree86 4.3.0 has finally made it into Debian unstable. See the announcement." Note that Direct Rendering is broken (there's already a bug filed, and I'm experiencing the same problem - looks like something small and stupid, affecting everyone), so don't dist-upgrade just yet.

Simon Bates writes "The University of Toronto's KMDI is hosting a conference to debate the future of open source models of development in software and beyond, addressing how this movement will affect the way we work, learn and stay healthy. Among the 30 speakers will be Eben Moglen, Columbia law school professor and legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation, who has recently described free software as: 'a social movement with specific political goals which will characterize not only the production of software in the twenty-first century, but the production and distribution of culture generally'. The conference will be held from May 9th to 11th and will be webcast."

David Hersey writes "ADTMag reports that the semantic web technologies are taking real form in the wake of recent W3C approvals and early pioneering work by vendors such as IBM, Boeing, Adobe and others. These technologies have been developing for several years. When and If the finally take form, they hold the potential of raising the capabilties of internet users and internet technology applications to levels that are today impractical due to the web's document-centric architecture."

comforteagle writes "Sun's Chief Technology Officer Simon Phipps has answered Eric Raymond's open letter calling on Sun to open source Java." In the quoted response, Phipps says (condensed) "I'd say this is 100 per cent rant... His simplistic accusations don't hold water... If this is the way that Open Source treats its friends, I'd hate to see how it treats its enemies... It's pretty difficult to respond to this. He's so out of touch."

Colonel Panic writes "Why the lucky stiff has written one of the most unusual (and poignant) books about programming that I've ever encountered. The best description for it so far (seen on comp.lang.ruby) is that it's sort of like 'The Little Prince meets SICP'. However, it defies all attempts at description (at least in this small space), you've got to read it for yourself. Like SICP, the full text is available for free. This one is destined to become a classic - it will likely be known to future generations of jobless American computer scientists as 'The Fox Book.'"

jsight writes with his review of Rob McGregor's Practical C++, published by QUE. He writes "Some books attempt to do one thing really well, and others attempt a little of everything. This book is clearly an example of the latter, in full force. Weighing in at a hefty 900 pages, you would expect this book to be crammed with chapters and details on every aspect of the STL and basic C++. In the following review, I am going to cover where it succeeds in doing this, and where it fails." (This book has been out for a few years; what books would make more sense today for a C++ learner's library?)

justinarthur writes "At 04:36 UTC, Linux kernel version 2.6.3 has been made available. As is typical, downloaders are advised to utilize a mirror upon file availability. There are many changes from version 2.6.2, including recent ALSA patches, XFS fixes, and updates in many other areas." Update: 02/18 14:15 GMT by T : Peter Willis points out that kernel 2.4.25 (changelog) was also released, and writes "Incidentally, a security advisory dated today states there is an exploit in kernels up to 2.4.24 and 2.6.2, but the two releases today don't seem to reflect any changes, so get ready to patch up as soon as a patch pops up. More details on the vulnerability here."

An anonymous reader writes "It's easy to get lost in the world of 'little languages' -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages. Many Linux programmers and systems administrators would benefit from adding a Rexx implementation to their collection of go-to tools."

Mike Bouma writes "A new screenshot showing OS4's default icon set by Martin 'Mason' Merz has been revealed. Also Q&A session 27 with Amiga's CTO Fleecy Moss is now available. Hyperion, Eyetech, AmigaWorld.net and many more exhibitors will attend the upcoming AmiGBG fair in Sweden." I also like the fantasy Amiga linked to from the Q&A session.

Tanmay Kudyadi writes "An article from NewScientist.com reports that half of all human languages will have disappeared by the end of the century, as smaller societies are assimilated into national and global cultures. This may be great news if one is looking at a common standard for communication, but it dosen't help those designing the next generation of programming languages. For example, there's an extremely strong link between Panini's Grammar and computer science (PDF link), and with every language lost, there is a possibility that we may have missed an opportunity at improving the underlying heuristics."

Linzer writes "A mailing-list message posted by Mandrake Linux's main developer on the Cooker mailing-list states that the development version of the distro is about to revert from XFree86 4.4 to the 4.3 version because of XFree86's recent license change. Mandrake contributors have started asking for justifications from MdkSoft. Many point out features of XF86 4.4 [an 'an open source X11-based desktop infrastructure'] they can't live without, including support for some not so uncommon hardware. A later Cooker mailing-list post extends a bit on the reasons."

HitByASquirrel writes "Just doing the rounds and I found that Zend has released PHP 5.0 Beta 4: 'This fourth beta of PHP 5 is also scheduled to be the last one (barring unexpected surprises, that did occur with beta 3). This beta incorporates dozens of bug fixes since Beta 3, rewritten exceptions support, improved interfaces support, new experimental SOAP support, as well as lots of other improvements, some of which are documented in the ChangeLog.' Hopefully they won't have any 'unexpected surprises' and we'll see this before summer!"

An anonymous reader writes "While it's all well and good to find out how to upgrade your kernel to 2.6, as this recent /. story pointed out, developers, especially device driver developers, might be more interested in the kernel's new device driver model. Over at Linux Devices, there's a new article on Migrating device drivers to Linux kernel 2.6. The short version: That little ole Hello, World! kernel module is a heckuva lot more complicated than it used to be."