I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary: Canonical assert that the act of compilation creates copyright over the binaries, and you may not redistribute those binaries unless (a) the license prevents Canonical from restricting redistribution (eg, the GPL), or (b) you follow the terms of their IP policy. This means that, no matter what Dustin's blogpost says, Canonical's position is that you must ask for...

This past weekend, in his keynote at DebConf (the Debian Project's annual conference in Heidelberg, Germany), Software Freedom Conservancy's Distinguished Technologist and President, Bradley M. Kuhn, announced Conservancy's Debian Copyright Aggregation Project. This new project, formed at the request of Debian developers, gives Debian contributors various new options to ensure the defense of software freedom. Specifically, Debian contributors may chose to either assign their copyrights to...

On 16th August 2015, the Debian project has celebrated its 22nd anniversay, making it one of the oldest popular distribution in open source world.

A couple of weeks I visited my mother back home in Norway. She had gotten a new laptop some time ago that my brother-in-law had set up for her. As usual when I come for a visit I was asked to look at some technical issues my mother was experiencing with her computer. Anyway, one thing I discovered while looking at these issues was that my brother-in-law had installed OpenOffice on her computer. So knowing that the OpenOffice project is all but dead upstream since IBM pulled their developers...

The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the second alpha release of the installer for Debian 9 "Stretch", live from the DebConf Birthday Party in Heidelberg, Germany!

Join us in celebrating GNOME's birthday this Saturday, August 15th. This is a great chance to tell the world why you love GNOME, inspire others to give it a try, give back to the community, and just wish GNOME a happy birthday.

On Debian-based systems, we use a YAML-based implementation of AppStream, called “DEP-11″. DEP-11 exists for historical reasons (the DEP-11 YAML format was a superset of AppStream once) and because YAML, unlike XML, is one accepted file format by the Debian FTPMasters team, who we want to have on board when adding support for AppStream. So I’ve spent the last few days on setting up the DEP-11 generator for Kubuntu

The future of the Ubuntu Software Center is uncertain, even if some of the Ubuntu developers are thinking about an upgrade for the application or a replacement. The core problem seems to be related to the fact that Ubuntu uses DEB files and it's not longer considered a viable method of providing updates through the Ubuntu Software Center.

Over the weekend the Debian project put out a call, over Twitter, for UEFI horror stories as their developers begin to take a more serious look at Debian & UEFI, with the creation of a UEFI team. As part of their work they have asked for a list of all known broken UEFI implementations so that they can try to find workarounds, or at the very least document their brokenness.

As laid out by the plans last month, GCC 5 has become the default compiler within the Debian "Unstable" archive. Matthias Klose posted the announcement today about GCC 5 being the default and the libstdc++6 ABI changes.

A few days ago, fellow Qt/KDE team member Lisandro gave an update on the situation with migration to Plasma 5 in Debian Testing (AKA Stretch).  It's changed again.  All of Plasma 5 is now in Testing. The upgrade probably won’t be entirely smooth, which we’ll work on that after the gcc5 transition is done, but it will be much better than the half KDE4 SC half Kf5/Plasma 5 situation we’ve had for the last several days.

Michael Niedermayer, the leader of the FFmpeg project for the past eleven years, has made a surprise announcement today: he's resigning as its leader. Niedermayer is resigning as he no longer feels he's the best leader for FFmpeg, given the current Libav fork still persisting even after Debian dropped Libav and is returning to FFmpeg.

Since the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2015 and GNU Hurd 0.6 this year, I've been meaning to run some new performance benchmarks considering my previous Hurd benchmarks were last done in 2011.

During Akademy I hold a session about porting applications to Wayland. I collected some of the general problems I saw in various KDE projects and want to highlight them in this blog post, too. Star...

The DebConf content team is pleased to announce the schedule of DebConf15, the forthcoming Debian Developers Conference. From a total of nearly 100 talk submissions, the team selected 75 talks. Due to the high number of submissions, several talks had to be shortened to 20 minute slots, of which a total of 30 talks have made it to the schedule.

We are aware that the current situation in testing is very unfortunate, with two main issues:1. systemsettings transitioned to testing before the corresponding KDE Control Modules 2. plasmoids such as plasma-nm transitioned to testing before plasma-desktop 5.

While Debian supports many CPU architectures, it's working to remove support for the Sun/Oracle SPARC architecture. As of this weekend, Debian has dropped SPARC from their unstable, experimental, and jessie-updates archives.

GNOME Flashback 3.16/3.17 packages landed in Debian testing and Ubuntu wily. GNOME Flashback is the project which continues the development of components of classic GNOME session, including the GNOME Panel, the Metacity window manager, and so on. The full changelog can be found in ...

Slightly less than one year ago, the Debian community had an extended discussion on whether the FFmpeg multimedia library should return to the distribution. Debian had followed the contentious libav fork when it happened in 2011, but some community members were starting to have second thoughts about that move.