Copyrighteous

In Brazilian Portuguese, "bombeiro" is the word for both a fireman and a plumber. If someone asks you to call a "bombeiro," their statement is usually unambiguous due to context. Usually.

Both SVG source and t-shirts are available at cost.

As I mentioned I would a month or so ago, I attended a workshop on Computing in the Cloud organized by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference aimed to discuss the policy issues that are raised by the shift from computing on machines we own and have direct control over to computing on servers owned by others. Think Google, Facebook, MySpace, and that lot.

I talked about what all this might mean for free software and for open source and our communities, a bit about the AGPL, and discussed some ideas of how might proceed as a community. Princeton has been organized enough to post audio and video of the whole conference, including recordings of my talk, in a variety of formats and qualities (although unfortunately not in Vorbis and Theora).

As I said in my FSF membership appeal last month, I think complications raised by "cloud computing" are one of the most important sets of challenges facing free software this year.

In the "bits from the Planet Debian maintainer" department...

Steve Kemp has been running a little index and search script for Planet Debian for a couple years now that lets you search for old entries that have showed up on Planet Debian. He was going to take his system offline but, since it was in use by a variety of people, he opted to move it into the default Planet Debian instead.

You should be able to see and use the search box in the sidebar on Planet Debian now. Feedback is welcome, I'm sure. Thanks to Steve for the fantastic addition to our aggregator.

I'm going to be giving a reprise of the Laptop Liberation talk I gave at Cornell University in November at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in the Kansai region of Japan on January 7th. If you around, please feel free to show up. If you are in Osaka, Kyoto or Nara and would like to have lunch or dinner, please email me and we can try to arrange something.

Details on the talk is online here in English and Japanese (thanks Mika!) although the talk itself will be in English.