Open Source News from FOSDEM 2009 - Day 1

"The process stagnated a bit over the years until Debian threatened to take out the ONC-RPC code, which in effect meant taking out glibc4 all together. But Simon was happy to announce that Sun had finally been able to contact all the authors and get approval for a license change. Since Thursday February 5th the ONC-RPC has been relicensed and is now officially free....

"Mark Surman's opening keynote was an interesting insight into the workings of Mozilla. The official mission statement of Mozilla states "To guard the open nature of the internet", but what does this mean for Mozilla's future? How far can it go and what comes after that...

"Bdale said that Debian has contemplated using a Code of Conduct similar to what Ubuntu is using, but it is very hard to integrate something like that into the current structure of Debian. He did recommend that anyone who wants to start their own Free Software project use such a Code of Conduct. The Debian Manifesto and Free Software Guidelines affect the project from a technical point of view. A Code of Conduct does the same on a social level. A good Free Software project needs both...

"Transformations are the other new feature that XRandR 1.3 adds. They make it easy to rotate, flip and scale the display image. It also adds the ability to do keystone correction, that means deforming the image by moving the corners. You can use this for example to correct the display of a beamer that projects at an angle. I asked Matthias how that works in combination with compositing which is also able to do these kinds of transformations. Matthias answered that it works transparently as it should, but when compositing is available it is better to use that instead of the XRandR transformations to prevent slowdowns due to the extra framebuffer copies that need to be stored."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• FOSDEM - the hordes(Feb 09, 2009)
• RandR 1.3 Explained, Demonstrated (Video)(Feb 09, 2009)
• dot.KDE: A Wonderful Second FOSDEM Day(Feb 27, 2007)
• dot.KDE: KDE Storms First Day of FOSDEM 2007(Feb 26, 2007)
• FOSDEM.org: Last FOSDEM Interviews(Feb 22, 2007)
• FOSDEM.org: Second Batch of FOSDEM Interviews(Feb 07, 2007)