The 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium took place last week in Tokyo. The goal of these symposiums is to bring leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers, with the goal of increasing open source participation by talented Japanese developers, with this symposium in particular being no different.

Andrew Morton was on hand to speak about the status and direction of kernel development, covering a lot of interesting kernel process material and specifically highlighting areas that need to be worked on including solid state disks and the linux-next tree.

James Morris presented on the SE Linux project, Thomas Gleixner spoke about the advantages of CFS and Paul Moore talked about labeled networking. Toshiharu Harada,project manager of TOMOYO Linux, was really able to explain to the developers in attendance about how to participate in the LKML and provided words of encouragement to other young developers like himself.

While the majority of the audience were from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia. The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University. An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.

Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan - something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to!

For more information on the 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, please visit the following:

All speaker slides posted on LF Japan's website: http://www.linux-foundation.jp/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=10

James Morris' notes, photos and slides: http://james-morris.livejournal.com/31240.html

In the spirit of freedom and openness, we are happy to make the agreement public today here. We hope it will be a useful tool both in addressing existing legal threats and also in suggesting methods for addressing threats as yet unknown.

The agreement is, of course, a legal document. Some of the language is routine legal terminology, and some concerns the parties to the case and is of no general interest. On the other hand, the agreement has some important ideas expressed in terminology that may be unfamiliar to the non-lawyer reader, and so some explanation may be useful. Here are some pointers on where to find the juicy parts and how to figure out what they mean. To state the obvious, this is not intended as legal advice and should not be relied on as such.

I wrote about it back in June, based on Red Hat's press release, but now we have the agreement itself, so we can verify that the settlement covers everybody, upstream and downstream, and not just Red Hat and not just Red Hat customers, while at the same time satisfying the requirements of the GPL. Tiller explains the various clauses. So let's go over some of the pertinent language in detail. Tiller explains it, but I'm going to break it down a bit more, to make sure you understand. Of course, in doing that, there is always a chance that I will make a mistake, and I'm not a lawyer, so if there is any perceived difference between what I write and what Tiller wrote, he's correct. I'm just trying to explain legal terminology in ways that make it more accessible to you. If you still have questions, you can send them to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Tiller says they'll try to address them in future posts on Red Hat's site.