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The "Project Harmony" name has a long and not entirely encouraging history; it is usually applied to projects aimed at obnoxious licensing situations (examples being Qt and Java), and the projects have, on the face of it, failed to achieve their goals. The most recent use of this name looks like a variation on that theme: this project, which seeks to create a set of standard agreements for contributors to open source projects, has been widely derided as a secretive attempt by a specific vendor to push copyright assignment policies on the community. During a session at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, this project came out and actually showed the world what it has been doing.

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At this year's edition of Camp KDE, John Layt reported in on his research to try to determine the right course for adding geolocation features to KDE. Currently, there is no common API for applications to use for tagging objects with their location or to request geolocation data from the system. There are a number of different approaches that existing applications have taken, but a shared infrastructure that allows geolocation data to be gathered and shared between applications and the desktop environment is clearly desirable. Subscribers can click below for a report on the talk from this week's Development page.

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Reporting from the second day of the 2011 Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management Summit is now available. Topics discussed this day include the future of storage devices, I/O resource management, working set estimation, virtual machine sizing, kernel memory use accounting, transparent huge pages, stable pages, and more; click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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The opening session at the second day of the 2011 Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management workshop was led by Michael Cornwall, the global director for technology standards at IDEMA, a standards organization for disk drive manufacturers. His talk covered the changes that are coming in the storage industry and how the Linux community can get involved to make things work better. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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It has been a mere eight months since the 2010 Linux Filesystem, Storage, and Memory Management Summit was held in Boston, but that does not mean that there is not much to talk about - or that there has not been time to get a lot done. This article (subscribers only) contains coverage from the first day of the 2011 summit; topics discussed include writeback, the state of the virtual filesystem layer, transcendent memory, memory control groups, filesystems in the cloud, memory compaction, and more.

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There are rumors suggesting that the CentOS 5.6 release is imminent - though that is something we have heard before. This release will certainly be welcome to numerous CentOS users, but there can be no doubt that its tardiness - and, in particular, the absence of CentOS 5 security updates caused by its delay - has been a bit of a wakeup call for those users. If this much-used distribution is to remain viable into the future, some important changes will need to be made and those who depend on it will have to step up their support. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article.

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The SUSE family of distributions has the motto "have a lot of fun," but it's Slackware that really pushes that philosophy to its limit. While most of the major Linux distributions are shaped by corporate influence, community politics, and pursuit of mainstream success, Patrick Volkerding has taken a much different path with Slackware, which is readily apparent in the release candidate of Slackware 13.37. Click below (subscribers only) for an early look at Slackware 13.37.

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Way back in the early days of Linux, shortly after Linus Torvalds switched the kernel from his own "non-commercial" license to the GPL, he also added an important clarification to the kernel's license. In the COPYING file at the top of the kernel tree since mid-1993, there has been a clear statement that Torvalds, at least, does not consider user-space programs to be derived from the kernel, and thus are not subject to the kernel's license:

Some recent analyses of Google's Bionic libc implementation, which claim that Google may be violating the kernel's license, seem to be missing—or misunderstanding—that clarification. Subscriber's can click below for LWN's analysis of this issue from this week's edition.

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When LWN guest author Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier worked for Novell as the openSUSE community manager, he ran openSUSE more or less exclusively (modulo a few installs of Fedora and Ubuntu to see what other distros were up to). Since he left last year, he's resumed distribution-hopping and hasn't spent as much time with openSUSE. With some time away, he was looking forward to trying 11.4 and seeing what had changed. The answer? Not very much. Click below (subscribers only) to see what has and hasn't changed in openSUSE 11.4.

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There are advantages and disadvantages to running a development distribution like Rawhide. One of those is that users often get to experience new software well ahead of all but the most dedicated developers and testers. Whether this feature qualifies as an "advantage" or not will be left for the reader to determine. While (sometimes unwelcome) bits of GNOME 3 have been slipping onto your editor's desktop for a while, he has, thus far, avoided engaging with the full GNOME 3 experience. Nothing lasts forever, though, especially when it comes to development distributions. As the features slowly drained out of the GNOME "fallback" environment, it seemed to be the right time to jump in with both feet. What follows are some impressions of where GNOME is going.

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Current news

The 2.6.39-rc3 prepatch is out. "It's been another almost spookily calm week. Usually this kind of calmness happens much later in the -rc series (during -rc7 or -rc8, say), but I'm not going to complain. I'm just still waiting for the other shoe to drop. And it is possible that this really ended up being a very calm release cycle. We certainly didn't have any big revolutionary changes like the name lookup stuff we had last cycle. So I'm quietly optimistic that no shoe-drop will happen." The short-form changelog is in the announcement, or see the full changelog for all the details.

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Ryan Paul reports that Nokia is transitioning Symbian away from an open source software model. "It's possible that Nokia has given up on using the open EPL license because moving the development in-house has made the boundary between the company's own proprietary bits and the underlying platform rather blurry. It's extremely unfortunate that this model will effectively prevent Nokia's Symbian code base from going off into the sunset as an open project that can be repurposed by the remaining Symbian enthusiasts. It's also disappointing that Nokia doesn't seem to care anymore. After spending hundreds of millions of euros and many years of effort to be able to distribute the code under the EPL, it seems absurd to throw it all away and revert to a license that imposes bizarre restrictions on source code access."

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CentOS has updated C4: dhcp (man-in-the-middle attack).

Debian has updated x11-xserver-utils (arbitrary command execution as root), ikiwiki (cross-site scripting), gitolite (man-in-the-middle attack), isc-dhcp (man-in-the-middle attack), and dhcp3 (man-in-the-middle attack).

Fedora has updated F14: libtiff (arbitrary code execution).

Mandriva has updated dhcp (man-in-the-middle attack).

Slackware has updated shadow (denial of service).

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CyanogenMod 7.0 is out. "CM7 is based on the 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) release of Android from Google. We've added most of the great features from CM6 you know and love, and many new ones including support for several tablets. We are currently providing support for 30 devices! I continue to be amazed with this community and the dedication of everyone involved." CyanogenMod is an alternative Android distribution; LWN reviewed this release in March.

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Pamela Jones has announced that Groklaw will stop publishing articles on May 16. "I know a lot of you will be unhappy to hear it, so let me briefly explain, because my decision is made and it's firm. In a simple sentence, the reason is this: the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won. SCO as we knew it is no more. There will be other battles, and there already are, because the same people that propped SCO up are still going to try to destroy Linux, but the battlefield has shifted, and I don't feel Groklaw is needed in the new battlefield the way it was in the SCO v. Linux wars." Pamela, you did great work; we hope your next project is as fruitful and satisfying.

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CentOS 5.6 has been released. See the announcement (click below) or the release notes for more details.

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As many LWN readers will have heard, long-time kernel developer David Brownell recently passed away. His contributions to the code are many, but it is clear that they were outweighed by his contributions to the community. He will be much missed.

A collection point has been set up for condolences to be passed on to David's family. People outside of our community are often not fully aware of the role a loved one plays in the community; this is a chance to let David's family know more about how many lives he touched and how valuable his work was. If you would like to share your memories of David, they may be sent to dbrownell-condolences@kernel.org; from there, they will be passed on to his family.

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The Linux Foundation has announced its annual Linux Foundation Video Contest. "The theme for this year's contest is dedicated to the 20th Anniversary of Linux, and Linus Torvalds will choose the winner among community favorites."

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Karanbir Singh reports that new images are available for the x86_64 version of CentOS 5.6 due to an issue with the eclipse-ecj package. "To address this issue, we had to issue a new set of ISOs, and since the package content was changing, rebuild metadata. Which in turn needed a complete rebuild of the ISOS ( but not the install tree ). Over the course of the morning, Fabian and Manuel were able to test the new tree, and our automated tests ran through for the ISOs. There was also a lot of rollback work that needed to be done, including handling the torrent tracker, issuing new torrents, making sure the mirror network etc. Much of which is done manually; and the main reason things took almost 18 hrs to resolve."

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Lennart Poettering presents part 6 of the series 'systemd for Administrators'. This one looks at chroot() environments. "One of the big advantages of systemd is that all daemons are guaranteed to be invoked in a completely clean and independent context which is in no way related to the context of the user asking for the service to be started. While in sysvinit-based systems a large part of the execution context (like resource limits, environment variables and suchlike) is inherited from the user shell invoking the init skript, in systemd the user just notifies the init daemon, and the init daemon will then fork off the daemon in a sane, well-defined and pristine execution context and no inheritance of the user context parameters takes place."

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