LocalFOSS

The worldwide LinuxChix community welcomes its latest chapter, AussieChix, on International Women's Day. Following on the heels of Frances E. Allen being the first woman ever to receive the prestigious 'Turing Award,' AussieChix aims to highlight and encourage women in computing.

While the organisation has a key interest in free and open source software (eg Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice.org) the focus of the group is to show women in computing that they are not alone.

AussieChix has emerged from the amalgamation of the Sydney and Melbourne chapters of LinuxChix, and throws open its doors to women across Australia. AussieChix is not an exclusive club - far from it. It is free to join, and the only requirements are "Be polite, be helpful." (Which makes us sound like the new millennium version of the Country Women's Association - next, a virtual lamington drive!)

From the 15th to the 20th of January, the University of New South Wales played host to over seven hundred Free and Open Source Software hackers and users for the 2007 linux.conf.au conference.

The conference, held every year since 2001, aims to bring together the community in a week long hackfest. This year was no different. Featuring keynote addresses from the likes of Chris Blizzard of the OLPC team, Andrew Tannenbaum - famous both for writing one of the most used Operating System text books and for claiming he would have failed Linus Torvalds if he had been Tannenbaums student and a host of others.

Some people were so keen to attend the conference they resorted to "e-begging" for the money to attend. One such group, best know for their site pleasesendustolinuxconfau.info raised almost $10,000.00 US to cover the costs to attend from the United States, with a large part donated from their University.

In a surprise announcement, the government of the Northern Territory has announced that they are testing the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machines with a view to launching trials in remote communities.

The OLPC has been designed for children in the developing world, in regions that struggle for basic infrastructure like clean running water, and electricity. So it may come as a surprise to some that an Australian state government has put up a hand to trial the new laptops.

The Northen Territory is confronted with a number of unique challenges. Whilst most of the population resides in Darwin, the capital city, there are a number of remote communities throughout the top end of Australia that experience similar issues to those faced by remote communities in developing nations.

3 members of MIT's Imara Project recently took a trip to the pacific island nation of Fiji. They weren't going for the white sand beaches or crystal clear waters. Instead they were on a mission.

Thanks to a donation from the Google Open Source Programme Office the Imara members were carrying ten laptops for the rural school district of Taveuni.

Jonathan Proulx explains why they went with laptops rather than desktop systems. "We chose laptops for the project, both for shipping concerns (shipping PCs to developing nations tends to be prohibitively expensive) and because electrical power isn't available at all the school locations. We used Lenovo Thinkpad R52s due to their large screens, low cost, and Linux-friendly components."

The countdown has begun. In eight days, over five hundred delegates will descend on the University of New South Wales to take part in the Southern hemispheres premier Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Conference.

The annual conference, which was last year held in Dunedin - New Zealand, has been growing strongly since it was first launched in 1999 as the Conference of Australian Linux Users(CALU).

The conference organisers have already achieved something of a coup, attracting Andrew "Andy" Tannebaum, one of the giants in Operating Systems design. Mr Tannenbaum will be the first Keynote Speaker.

Linux Australia, Australia's peak Free and Open Source Software community group, announced the launch of a petition today calling on the federal government to resist pressure to abandon consumer and competition rights when drafting anti-circumvention laws. New laws are required under the terms of the Free Trade Agreement negotiated between Australia and the United States.

"The treaty doesn't force us to implement this like the US, where these laws have driven litigation to suppress academic publications, prevent third-party printer cartridge manufacturers, and eliminate competition by Open Source software. But naturally some large business interests are pressing for the same restrictions on legitimate access to digital material here." said Rusty Russell, Linux Australia's IP Policy Adviser.

The Australia Innovation Festival (http://ausinnovation.org) was launched last Friday at the ABC with Senator Coonan giving great praise to Australian companies who are being particularly innovative. Linux Australia was very excited to hear about these successes, particularly because many are based on Open Source technologies. Open Source development has created a variety of low risk, highly scalable and low cost platforms on which Australian organisations can be extremely innovative. They can also leverage a huge community of developers, users and testers to become world leaders in their industry.

Australian based Anthony Towns appears to have won the 2006 Debian Project Leader election. This has been Towns' second attempt, and his platform seems to have struck a chord with his fellow developers. When asked about his reaction to Towns' election win, Sydney based debian developer Matt Palmer had only one thing to say, "Yay, an Australian DPL."

The official announcement is yet to be made however we are relying on this page for our results: http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/leader2006/