Open Recall: OSI Elections, xda:devcon and Wikimedia on PRISM

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition of the Open Recall: Individual Members Election at the OSI, Webconverger 20, the first release candidate for Qt 5.1, Chrome raises its minimum Linux requirements, Canonical sponsoring xda:devcon and Wikimedia on its stance towards PRISM.

• OSI Individual Members Election – The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is moving further along in its plan to become a fully member-based organisation. OSI individual members can now be nominated for an election to fill one vacant seat on the OSI board between 8 and 19 July. The election results will be announced at OSCON from 22 to 26 July. Details on the nomination and election process are detailed on the OSI blog. The organisation plans to have a fully member-elected board by 2016.
  

• Webconverger 20 – The developers of the Webconverger live distribution aimed at setting up secured web kiosk machines have released Webconverger 20. This latest release updates Firefox to version 21, updates the distribution's packages based on the Progress Linux 2.0 release (itself based on Debian Wheezy) and slims the distribution image down from 441 MB to 357 MB. The new version also adds the option of using extra wide scrollbars for deploying Webconverger on touch screen machines.
  

• Qt 5.1 Release Candidate 1 – The Qt developers at Digia have prepared the first release candidate for version 5.1 of their open source application framework which has been in beta since the middle of May. RC1 adds online installers, additional Android support and an upgraded MinGW toolchain. Both online and offline installers for the framework are available from the Qt Downloads site.

• Chrome raises minimum Linux requirements – The latest stable Chrome release, version 28.0.1500.45, is raising the minimum requirements for the Linux distributions it runs on. Users will now have to use at least Ubuntu 12.04, Debian 7, openSUSE 12.2 and Fedora 17.
  

• Canonical sponsors xda:devcon – Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has announced that his employer Canonical will be sponsoring the first xda:devcon. The XDA Developers conference will take place from 8 to 11 August in Miami, Florida; Bacon will be speaking at the event about Canonical's mobile phone development efforts. The company decided to sponsor the conference because the XDA community has been helping to port its Ubuntu Touch interface to a number of mobile devices.
  

• Wikimedia on PRISM – The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind the Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects, has published a statement on the implications of the NSA's PRISM spy program on its services. According to the foundation's General Counsel, Geoff Brigham, "the Wikimedia Foundation has not received requests or legal orders to participate in PRISM, to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), or to participate in or facilitate any secret intelligence surveillance program." Brigham also says the Wikimedia Foundation has not changed its systems to make government surveillance easier.
  

(fab)