The Software Freedom Law Center just released a terrific readable guide to Free Open Source Software Legal Issues.
A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (html / pdf)
Our thanks to the SFLC and all the terrific people there for their tireless efforts to support open source software communities!
———————————————————————
16th International Smalltalk Joint Conference – Call for Contributions
August 25-29, 2008 – Amsterdam, the Netherlands
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008/
———————————————————————-
For the past 16 years, the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) has organised the International Smalltalk Conference, a lively forum on cutting edge software technologies that attract people from both academia and industry for a whole week. The attendees are both engineers using Smalltalk in business and students and teachers using Smalltalk both for research and didactic purposes.
As every year, this year’s edition of the largest European Smalltalk event will include the regular Smalltalk developers conference with renowned invited speakers, a Smalltalk camp that proves fruitful for interactions and discussions. Besides, this year will be held the 4th edition of the Innovation Technology Awards where prizes will be awarded to authors of best pieces of Smalltalk-related projects.
You can support the ESUG conference in many different ways:
* Sponsor the conference. New sponsoring packages are described at http://www.esug.org/supportesug/becomeasponsor/
* Submit a talk, a software or a paper to one of the events. See below.
* Attend the conference. We’d like to beat the previous record of attendance (116 people at Köthen, Germany in 2004)!
* Students can get free registration and hosting if they enroll into the the Student Volunteers program. See below.
The conference features the following events:
* Camp Smalltalk – There will be a Smalltalk camp the 23-24th of august
* Developers Forum
* Technology Forum
Developers Forum : International Smalltalk Developers Conference
——————
This year we are looking for YOUR experience on using Smalltalk. The list of topics includes, but is not limited to the following:
* XP practices
* Development tools
* Experience reports
* Model driven development
* Web development
* Team management
* Meta-Modeling
* Security
* New libraries & frameworks
* Educational material
* Embedded systems and robotics
* SOA and Web services
* Interaction with other programming languages
Submissions due on 1st June 2008
Notification of acceptance on 15 of June 2008 More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
How to sumbit?
——————
Pay attention: the places are limited so do not wait till the last minute to apply. Prospective presenters should submit a request to esug-info@esug.org
following the template below. Please use this template since the email will be automatically processed!
Subject: [ESUG 2008 Developers] + your name
First Name:
Last Name:
Email where you can always be reached:
Title:
Abstract:
Bio:
Any presentation not respecting this form will be discarded automatically
Technology Forum
——————
We are proud to announce the 4th Innovation Technology Awards. The top
3 teams with the most innovative software will receive, respectively, 500 Euros, 300 Euros and 200 Euros during an awards ceremony at the conference. Developers of any Smalltalk-based software are welcome to compete.
More information at http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
Student Volunteer Program
——————
If you are a student wanting to attend ESUG, have you considered being a student volunteer? Student volunteers help keep the conference running smoothly; in return, they have free accommodations, while still having most of the time to enjoy the conference.
More information at
http://www.esug.org/conferences/2008
Esug Student Volunteers Program
We hope to see you there and have fun together.
Great video of the Waveplace XO Laptop Day.
At the Hasso-Plattner-Institut (HPI) in Potsdam, all Bachelor students have to participate in a software development project in their final year. Said projects are usually issued by industry collaborators, and hence are “real” development tasks that often yield actual products. The different HPI research groups coach the student project groups.
This year’s Bachelor project of the Software Architecture Group was issued by CollabNet, the company that spawned Subversion. The students are working on SqueakSVN to make SVN version control and tooling available in Squeak.
Coaching in the Software Architecture Group includes training in agile methodologies, with a strong emphasis on Extreme Programming. Of course, this includes heavy testing.
The students were facing the question of how to make the current project status perceivable in a motivating way. Ideally, the status should be immediately visible when entering the project room in the morning, without the need to start up a Squeak image and run all the tests first.
They came up with a really nice idea: the “test stoplight”, or, rather, “golight” to make it sound more positive. It’s as simple as this. A wooden board, three red, yellow, and green light bulbs, sockets, power supply lines, and an USB-controlled multiway connector make up the hardware part of the golight.
Realizing the software part was also easy. One computer plays the role of a dedicated test server, running a Squeak image. In this image, a process checks out the most recent version of the software from the repository every five minutes, runs all the tests, and switches on the light corresponding to the color of the TestRunner bar. At night, it switches the lights off entirely.
The software does not even have to know anything about the protocol used to drive the multiway connector. The connector comes with a set of command-line tools that can be run from Squeak using OSProcess. These are currently limited to the Windows operating system, but since controlling the connector is basically about writing some data to a serial connection, it should not be too hard to come up with solutions for other platforms.
This morning, when I first saw the golight, it was showing green.
Feel free to contact us for detailed building instructions and information related to the software!
Well I couldn’t resist. Aaron E. Walsh sent out an invitation to the Squeak – Croquet communities for an ad-hoc Immersive Education Meeting. The Boston Digital Summit held in January covered the Education Grid, this meeting was a chance to review this information for those that were not able to make it to the summit.
Second Life was quite an experience. I had to sign up and go through some training, figure out how to get to Sun’s virtual auditorium and sit down. It was quite amusing to see some people show up on stage and not know how to sit down either, so I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe I should have spent more time in the training.
Aaron, reviewed the details of the Education Grid. The Grid is an education content virtual repository focused on interoperability, standards, and quality educational content. The goal is to provide standards that allow content to be developed to operate in different virtual worlds. These standards must be open source to ensure that content can be made freely available.
Content is just a piece of the puzzle in education. Educators also need tools to be able to evaluate the progress of students. There are a number of general tools that should be developed and made available in a consistent way for each offering. Aaron mentioned, “While it is possible to record everything that happens in a virtual world there is no way an educator could watch everything a student did in an activity that might take 2 hours.” Tools that allow educators to evaluate raw data, to assess progress and to track grades, and to create content are essential.
Quality content will be assured by having a Peer Review of offerings before the become part of the grid. The peers will be selected from the community and people with special expertise will be sought to make sure that the education goals are met, the content is accurate, standards are followed, and licensing is compatible to be a part of the grid.
Licensing and interoperability were the major concerns once Aaron opened the floor to questions. Ownership of the content was also discussed. Aaron mentioned that a not-for-profit organization would own the grid, but that the grid would be virtual and would be hosted by multiple organizations. I’m not sure there was a full answer about the ownership of the content. I would have suggested that copyright stay with the author or developing organization, and that the grid would receive unlimited rights to distribute the content, much in the same way were are trying to organize the Squeak community.
Well I ran out of time but Aaron did a very nice job of wrapping it up just a few minutes over. Thank you! The concept is really a terrific idea. I hope that our communities will join together and support developing freely available virtual world educational materials. Aaron mentioned that other meetings will be held in Croquet, I look forward to that. I hope to see you there. Hopefully that meeting will be just as well attended as the SL meeting.
The European Smalltalk Users Group – ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.
From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :
Hi all
as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/
PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in Smalltalk
Rules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowed
Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr
Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
EDITORIAL By Ron Teitelbaum.
You get what you pay for. The world is much better for all the corporate contributions to end poverty and the huge commitment over the years to help educate the worlds children. There is no question that the world owes a huge debt to these companies. Now that corporations have made such great strides throughout the world they should be paid handsomely for their computers and software. After all, corporate resources can never be matched by a Non-Profit.
From Aaron E. Walsh:
Happy New Year, everyone. As we enter 2008 I’m happy to announce that the Boston Digital Media Summit (next weekend) is focused on Immersive Education and will feature Croquet in several sessions (see the schedule of events below; Julian’s keynote is on Day 1 — January 12th).
Please join us if you’re in the Boston area or would like to make a trip for the event. The news release is below, and I’ve attached the PDF version as well.
It’s also in HTML format along with related news items at:
http://ImmersiveEducation.org/#NEWS
The Summit schedule of events has been set, which you can also see at:
http://mediagrid.org/summit/ (main page)
http://mediagrid.org/summit/program.html (schedule of events)
Best regards,
Aaron
From Hernan Wilkinson:
Hi,
I just wanted to let you know that the Smalltalks 2007 presentations are available at https://www.dc.uba.ar/events/smalltalks/2007/presentaciones
Most of them are in English although not all.
You can look some pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/smalltalks2007 and http://picasaweb.google.com/WeybridgeWay/1erCongresoArgentinoDeSmalltalk
I wanted to give a public “Thanks” to ESUG for their support (DVD, book, ideas, etc), Viewpoints, Dan Ingalls, James Robertson, John Sarkela and Bruce Badger for the videos. Stef and Noury sent me something to read but finally I did not have the time to do it (sorry). Also, to all the sponsors that helped us with the conference.
Below are some comments we got in the Argentine Smalltalk lists (first in Spanish and then in English, translated by Andres Valloud).
It is very hard for me to find the right words to express how happy we are with the outcome of the conference, not only for the amount of people that came but also for their kindness and technical level of the presentations. Thanks to all.
Hernan
(more…)
The Federation of American Scientists and the Kauffman Foundation are backing the Boston College’s own Aaron E. Walsh efforts to build virtual reality education content for virtual worlds like Croquet, Second Life and Project Wonderland.
Walsh has been focusing on delivering content to children with disabilities through the Grid Institute an organization that promotes the use of a public utility grid to develop and deliver high-end virtual reality and 3-D simulation programs.
This new multi-million dollar project called Immersive Education promises to bring together an international group of educators, researchers and companies along with foundations to develop standards and technologies that will enable a much richer interactive 3-D educational experience.
The award winning Immersive Education software, now on it’s third generation was originally only available for university students. The project was started in 2004 at Boston College. The software is now available as an open standard for educational software. Visit immersiveeducation.org for more information.
The Weekly Squeak 