Linutop à Solutions Linux, Paris, La Défense, 30 janvier au 1er février 2007

Linutop will makes its first public appearance tomorrow at Solutions Linux in Paris. French developers who are interested in getting their hands on one of our 50 development units should call up Fred at 0685868576 and schedule an appointment. Others who just wanna see the Linutop in action are welcome to drop by booth D 16 during the exhibition.

Meanwhile, rumor has it that someone else might be dropping by Montréal for the February meeting of FACIL with a mysterious Free Software -powered aluminum box...

UTF-8 Migration Tool now in Debian unstable

I previously blogged about UTF-8 Migration Tool, a GTK2 wizard that helps users upgrade their legacy locale and recode text files to their UTF-8 equivalent. After merging a number of patches from Nicolas François to fix various parsing issues, I am now happy to report that the package has entered Debian's unstable distribution.

Plenty of migration cases remain untested, though, and the Debian i18n team particularly welcomes testing for locales that utilize a non-default legacy encoding or that contain an @modifier part.

If no major issue is found, the goal would be to release this package with Etch to help users migrate their system to UTF-8.

Do you want to take over CUPS maintenance in Debian?

Kenshi sent the following GPG-signed message to the Debian CUPS mailing list today:

Hi folks,

As you know, there are many bugs about CUPS including Release-critical and I haven't an enough time to fix them.

My primary motivation was to internationalize/localize it. Now it is already implemented by upstream.

Unfortunately CUPS is too complex for me to maintain. I haven't a time to track bugs, I haven't an enough knowledge about Postscript or printer specific codes, and I haven't any testbed of user's printers.

If you'd like to become primary CUPS maintainer instead of me, I pass a baton happily :) Of course I'll support you such as uploading.

Thanks,

Interested parties should contact kmuto directly to manifest their intention.

Copywrong: Media Moguls versus Artists

One recurrent theme in discussions about Copyrights and Digital Rights Management is that the Media Industry allegedly represents the interests of the Artists. Yet, recent actions in Canada and elsewhere prove that Artists who benefited from the wider exposure of their creations via the Internet in fact oppose laws that would preserve and further entrench the monopoly of the Industry.

Finland's case is no different: as reported by Jaakko Kuivalainen in the Tekijänoikeuslaki blog [in Finnish], a number of Finnish Artist Coalitions are currently opposing the transfer of copyright issues from the Ministry of Education (who also handles cultural affairs) to the Ministry of Commerce, because they fear that the interests of the Media Industry would suddenly have precedence over those of the Artists and small Independent Cultural Producers.

Yet another proof that, no, Media Moguls do not speak on behalf of the Artists.