News briefs for October 15, 2018.
KDE e.V. announces it received a $300,000 USD donation from the Handshake
Foundation. According to the KDE
blog post, it plans to use $100,000 USD of the donation specifically toward development
of the Calligra office suite. Also, KDE celebrated its 22nd anniversary yesterday—Happy Birthday KDE!
UBports
announces Ubuntu Touch OTA-5 is out. This
over the air update of version 16.04 includes a more stable experience and new features, such as the
Morph QtWeb Engine browser, Qt automatic scaling, Kirigami 2 and community
art used for wallpapers, notification tones and ringtones.
Geoclue
2.5 is now available, and coder Zeeshan Ali is asking for help. Geoclue uses
the Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which was launched in 2013 in connection with its
Firefox OS project that has since been abandoned. The service is still
running, and users can contribute data, but it isn’t being maintained or
developed any longer. Zeeshan
Ali writes, “If your company relies on MLS
(directly or through Geoclue) and you’d want to secure the future of Open
Source geolocation, please do get in touch and we can discuss how we could
possibly achieve that.”
Red Hat developer Ivan Chavero yesterday submitted a new patch
for the Linux Code of Conduct. Phoronix
reports that the proposal “drops the
mention of ‘a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age,
body-size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and
expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status,
nationality,personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and
orientation.’ In place Ivan proposes, ‘our community an effective and
enriching experience to any sentient being in the Universe.'”
The Internet Freedom Festival—”5 Years Joining Forces to Fight
Censorship and Surveillance”—is being held in Valencia, Spain, April
1–5, 2019. The call for proposals is open until November 9, 2018. See
the IFF website for more
details, as well as news and updates from the community.