1. Two lucky Fellows win a notebook
2. Giacomo Poderi starts internship at FSFE
3. FSFE core team continues to grow
4. Ciarán O'Riordan and Gareth Bowker speak in London
5. Free Software Forum in Brasil
6. Access to Knowledge Conference in USA
7. Hearing for Microsoft antitrust case
1. Two lucky Fellows win a notebook
The Fellowship is extremely important to sustain the activities of the
Free Software Foundation Europe. For this reason, the FSFE tries to
find ways of saying thank you to all who joined: This year, two HP
Compaq notebooks were donated for random distribution among our
Fellows. The winners of the raffle are Andrea Di Dato from Italy, and
Wouter van Heyst from the Netherlands. Congratulations once more and
enjoy your new machines!
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2006q2/000134.html
2. Giacomo Poderi starts internship with FSFE
The Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes Giacomo Poderi as its new
intern. Giacomo lives in Zürich and works for FSFE from April to August
2006. His main task is administrative support for the President, the
office, and the whole FSFE team. Giacomo has studied Philosophy in
Bologna, Italy, and chose to work for FSFE because it allows to take
part in some processes deeply related with social and technical aspects
of daily life.
FSFE thanks Alexander Finkenberger for the valuable work he did during
his internship, which ended in March. Alexander has decided to
continue to work for FSFE on a volunteer basis and remains active in
the core team of FSFE.
3. FSFE core team continues to grow
Antonella Beccaria, Cristian Rigamonti and Patrick Ohnewein joined the
core team of FSFE. All of them have been active supporters of Free
Software for several years. Together with Stefano Maffulli, they turn
Italy into a firm and powerful base of the Free Software Foundation
Europe.
4. Ciarán O'Riordan and Gareth Bowker speak in London
On April 7th, the British Computer Society hosted a Free Software
evening where Ciarán O'Riordan gave a presentation about FSFE's work
against software patents and about the GPLv3, and Gareth Bowker gave a
presentation about copyright law and how DRM can restrict computer
users. Both answered questions and the discussion with the attendees
continued for a long time afterward.
5. Free Software Forum in Brasil
Georg Greve and Ciaran O'Riordan took part in the 7th edition of the
Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brasil. Georg Greve gave
one of the opening talks ("Free Software - Social Movement or
Technological Revolution?"), and participated in the sessions on Free
Software Foundation Latin America, 100% Free Software distributions,
and the license compatibility panel for the 2nd international
conference on GPLv3. Ciaran O'Riordan spoke about the work against
software patents and participated in various ways in the GPLv3
conference. Besides these public appearances, both also worked with
FSFE's sister organisation, the FSF Latin America and the local Free
Software community to strengthen the international Free Software
network.
6. Access to Knowledge Conference in USA
The Information Society Project at Yale Law School held a landmark
conference on Access to Knowledge (A2K) on April 21-23. Karsten Gerloff
moderated a podium on "Licensing Frameworks for Access to Knowledge".
The speakers investigated the possibilities and limitations of licenses
in regulating knowledge. The debate centered on the limits of the
Creative Commons concept.
The conference was a great opportunity to make contact with other
activists and academics in the A2K field. The organisers have documented
most of the conference in a public wiki.
http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/Yale_A2K_Conference
7. Hearing for Microsoft antitrust case
After many years of investigation, years of legal battle and literally
billions of Euro spent by Microsoft to uphold its monopoly, the
European Court in Luxembourg convened in its grand jury of 13 judges
for a one-week hearing. The purpose of this hearing was to decide
whether Microsofts accusations of unfair treatment and mistakes in
judgement by the European Commission are founded and whether the
decision should be abolished or modified.
In close cooperation with the Samba Team, the Free Software Foundation
Europe had a Team of five people present in Luxembourg to defend the
Commissions decision: Accompanied by FSFE president Georg Greve,
FSFE's lawyer on the case, Carlo Piana, and FSFE's media coordinators
Joachim Jakobs and Antonella Beccaria, Samba Team founder Andrew
Tridgell spoke in court on behalf of the FSFE. His clear and profound
explanations greatly helped invalidate many of the false claims made
by Microsoft. A decision is expected within this year, and also thanks
to the work done by FSFE and Samba, some slight optimism is warranted.
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
I'm pretty sure that most of you would refuse an email correspondence
based on proprietary formats, e.g. MS-Word attachments.
Some would even go to the point of deleting or bouncing such messages or
reply in tune with RMS's 'We Can Put an End to Word Attachments'
campaign :
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html>.
But what if your professional career, and eventually your life, should
depend on it?
What if you are going to apply for a wonderful job, a job dealing with
installing and maintaining Linux boxes, and the potential employer
demand
that the whole correspondence be managed in stupid word files?
What if you are desperate and willing to compromise, you fire
your shiny FOSS word processor and the file won't even load properly?
So? What to do? Borrowing somebody's PC? Dual boot? Give up?
I have started asking questions.
On Mon, 08 May 2006 20:23:50 +0200, "Ottavio Caruso" said:
> Dears Sirs,
>
> I am interested in applying for your vacancy COMPUTER
> TECHNICIAN/REF.[blah...]. You require that I download a document in
> ms-word format, then manipulate it and send it back to you by email.
> Unfortunately I have problems opening this document on my computer that
> runs a version of Linux.
>
> In Abiword, it looks all messed up and garbled. I'm sure I can find some
> trick to reformat it but then most likely it won't display properly on
> your computers.
>
> The only solution would be for me to borrow somebody else's PC, however
> I feel this is a diminution of my Linux skills, which are one of the
> requisites you ask for this job.
>
> A better solution would have been rich text format or html, which are
> more portable than MS-Word.
>
> I'd be glad if I had your opinion about it, so that I know if there is
> a work around or if I had better give up.
>
> Yours sincerely
>
> Ottavio Caruso
No answers expected, none received
Ottavio Caruso
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Shane, a thoughtful and interesting post - thank you.
I work at a Fortune 500 company which is a Microsoft shop and although it's difficult to generalize - each company/institution has its way of doing things - perhaps I can offer some advice concerning bringing Free Open Source Software into a traditional corporate environment.
In the year I spent fighting for the right to test and deploy my company's first official FOSS solution (others were running GNU/Linux secretly in closets; I myself prototyped an intranet site on GNU/Linux in 1997), I would say the single biggest obstacle was the fear that there would be "no throat to choke" - no accountability. I successfully countered this argument first of all by choosing among the largest, most active FOSS projects, contrasting these with "orphans" - proprietary solutions my company had chosen in the past which have since disappeared. I asserted that whether we chose proprietary or Free software, we would need an integrator in any case for installation, training, deployment, frontline maintenance, etc. So I carefully chose my integrator, who was able to send serious IT people (with suits and ties :) to meetings and propose reassuring SLA contracts. The technical director at the integrator was co-author of a reference work on the subject; I bought the book and passed it around at every meeting. I also mentioned the widespread IT industry support for FOSS projects outside of Microsoft, since the collaborative development model - made possible by the Internet - has proven itself as a better way to produce reliable, secure software. I insisted that how no matter how many times we tried to choke the throats of our company's Microsoft account managers, they remained incapable of improving the security of their internet browser or improving multilanguage support of their SharePoint product; they could only apologize and ask us to wait for the next version, whenever that might be (!).
I contrasted the difference between software built to standards (W3C, ISO, Dublin Core, LDAP) and designed for interoperability, and proprietary solutions designed to lock in revenue streams whether in the customer's interest or not.
I showed how FOSS can be very easily prototyped, in most cases by simply downloading binary executables and running them in a sandbox. This contrasts with most proprietary solutions, where an integrator designs a pilot project as a step in commitment (human resources, financial, legal) to a bigger project. In this vein I discussed the advantages of avoiding gigantism in our IT projects, and deploying focused projects which reduce risk, minimise business process disruption, and shorten project timelines.
After mentioning that there are 90,000 registered projects on Sourceforge (this was in 2004), I showed a short list of the FOSS titans: GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc. I cited examples of very successful companies relying on FOSS, such as Google with Python.
In my company's case, I chose an application which runs on Windows servers as well as GNU/Linux; I explained that this solution could be deployed immediately on today's Windows servers, compatible with existing corporate standards while minimising IT staff impact (very few GNU/Linux experts at my company); at the same time, opening a path to better performance, reliability, and security in the future the day we run the application over GNU/Linux. I added that although all 40,000 PCs and 90% of servers (the rest being proprietary Unices) at my company run Windows, I would bet that the new generation of IT personnel at our company were all running GNU/Linux at home and surfing the web with Firefox.
I avoided the Free versus Open Source discussion, since in my context this was picking nits; I spent many hours explaining that large successful Free software projects are not three guys in a garage, but extremely competent engineers many of which are employed by familiar IT companies. I did however successfully negotiate with our legal department to invert our standard intellectual property clause; my company explicitly renounced any intellectual property claims to software developed for and financed by our FOSS projects, so that it may be made available to the community. I explained that this contribution could be considered our end of a deal in which we got great software for free, created by others who have used and improved it before us. I felt that this aspect was very important; although I explained that the GNU GPL did not obligate us to publish source code since there was no distribution (we are final end-users), I thought it necessary to set that precedent for a FOSS project.
Finally, I demonstrated that for my project, my chosen solution would be at least seven times cheaper than the proposed Microsoft solution, the major differences being in licensing costs and in consulting/development necessary to adapt the MS solution to our needs.
Although I had the support of my business unit managers who were principally interested in the lower cost and faster deployment aspects, I had to endure some very tense meetings at which I was accused by IT executives of recklessness, incompetence, and worse. Several colleagues contacted me privately to say that they hoped I would succeed, although they themselves couldn't stick their necks out. In the end, the corporate IT director was called upon to decide and spent half a day hearing the arguments. He approved the solution as a new corporate standard, saying: "we must be pragmatic, not dogmatic" and "we have gone too far in our dependence on one IT supplier". Prudently, he directed that such projects be limited at first to noncritical databases and informational intranets. Today, FOSS projects are flourishing at my company; the first GNU/Linux servers have appeared in production as replacements for proprietary Unix servers, after tests showed that our in-house Unix tools could be easily recompiled and run over GNU/Linux. And several IT managers are reporting success with virtualization solutions, running Windows server images over GNU/Linux.
One final note: my company (a manufacturer not in IT) has absolutely nothing to gain by publicly discussing our IT infrastructure; you will not find a news article on Google that talks about this. But Microsoft is fully aware that its top-tier customers are testing the waters, and that the industry has changed. The major consulting firms in daily contact with large corporations are also aware of the change. I think FOSS is a clear choice for any company or institution which has to watch its IT budget, and a viable choice for richer corporations who want to improve security and deploy applications more quickly. I believe that corporations can be persuaded to accept the advantages of keeping code Free, in the same way that sustainable development has become a top-of-mind - an issue unheard of ten or fifteen years ago.
Sean DALY.
> Message du 03/05/06 23:54
> De : "Shane M. Coughlan" <shane(a)shaneland.co.uk>
> A : discussion(a)fsfeurope.org
> Copie à :
> Objet : A day with the boys from GLLUG
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> Recently I was down in London speaking to the Great London Linux User
> Group. I just posted a blog entry about my adventure here:
> https://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/a_day_with_the_b…
>
> I had a great time, and we touched on some pretty topical things. If
> you are interested in deployment of GNU/Linux and other Free systems in
> business environments, or in the danger that as Free Software gets more
> corporate we'll cooperate less, you might find something to mull over :)
>
> Shane
>
> - --
> Shane Martin Coughlan
> e: shane(a)shaneland.co.uk
> m: +447773180107
> w: www.shaneland.co.uk
> - ---
> Projects:
> http://mobility.opendawn.comhttp://gem.opendawn.com
> http://enigmail.mozdev.orghttp://www.winpt.org
> - ---
> Organisations:
> http://www.fsfeurope.orghttp://www.fsf.org
> http://www.labour.org.ukhttp://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk
> - ---
> OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
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