LFNW: LinuxFest Northwest

At the end of the month I’ll be back in Bellingham for my 3rd time at LinuxFest Northwest. LFNW happens to be the last independent regional Linux event on the west coast, now that the guys from Socal Linux Expo have sold their event to IDG (which was announced happened on April 1, 2008, and I believed completely).

If you’ll be there, please come to my session:

“Freedom and the Cloud: Developer Platforms meet Software as a Service”
A new wave of software development is taking shape, allowing developers to create and deploy software entirely through the browser. In this talk, Ted Haeger explains platform-as-a-service and some of the issues it raises regarding software freedom. What is the GPL’s “SaaS loophole”? How do web service providers promote or discourage the ethics of Free Software? Why does the Affero GPL matter? How does free software enable invigorate startup innovation, and what are the ethical obligations to reciprocate of the companies that use free software to build their business?