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Hi guys
I wanted to update you with regards the FAQ for giving talks about Free
Software.
There is a new section on the fellowship site for advocacy. At the
moment you'll find the English version of the FAQ there. We also have
the FAQ in the following languages:
- - German
- - French
- - Spanish
- - Italian
- - Bulgarian
Someone offered to do a Turkish translation and I'm waiting on that.
I've also been cheeky and asked a Japanese friend to do a Japanese
translation. Ditto Chinese Mandarin and Chinese Cantonese.
The translations of the FAQ are waiting on an update to the followship
CMS board system to allow all the characters to display properly.
Now, regarding the advocacy section of the site: I want to add a lot
more material there to help people spread the word about Free Software.
Suggestions and material welcome!
Regards
Shane
- --
Shane Martin Coughlan
e: shane(a)opendawn.com
m: +447773180107 (UK) +353862262570 (Ire)
w: www.opendawn.com
- ---
OpenPGP: http://www.opendawn.com/shane/publickey.asc
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What about classifying businesses according to the
Debian
guidelines (main, contrib and non-free)?
Businesses that deal with 100% free software (from
development to production) will fit in the main
section, the others in either contrib or non free.
By the way, I remember somebody here telling me some
time ago that the GBN was thrown a spanner from the
outside. I can only see spanners from inside.
Ottavio Caruso
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Hi all,
I am looking for a good way to explain Free Software to
*non-programmers* during a moderated show. It should be short (about 6
minutes), not to technically (I do not want to scare them off), and
illustrative.
To start I thought about using the recipe analogy because I have good
experiences with this example which others also share.
But now there should be an example for the audience, which shows the
advantage of the freedom to modify the software to your own needs. There
should be some pictures so not only someone is visible who is just
talking or explaining without really showing something.
First I thought of a /translation example/: Think about the case your
mother want to use a program, but she is not able to read English. And
than show someone who is translating a program into another language
(there is the possibility to show things on a screen).
But I do not know if that is something people are really concerned with.
So someone had the idea to adept a /Mozilla Firefox extension/ (Firefox,
because it is available on different platforms and a lot of people
already know it and perhaps use it). For example, adapt a library search
to a local library. But I do not know how difficult it is to do
something like this and I am unsure if the audience will understand it.
It should be easy to modify it. It does not matter if the result is
funny, or useful.
A friend argued OpenOffice.org, FireFox and embedded devices (which also
was an idea) are bad examples for showing practical work on the source
code and it would be better to use a language and application that does
not need a /building step/, like a python application.
Another friend said he thinks you cannot explain Free Software to a
non-programmer by showing someone modifying software, because the
audience does not know what a program is, so there is no point in
showing them a program and pretend to tell them that 'it is easy to
modify it'.
After thinking about this I am playing with the idea to just use the
recipe example and show someone cooking. But I am not sure if it is good
not showing software at all.
Now, what do you think? Do you have good approaches which might help me? Or
have experiences that a certain approach did not work with a
non-programmer audience?
I am looking forward to your replies.
With best wishes,
Matze
--
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom! (http://www.fsfe.org)
Koen Vervloesem wrote in
http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/08/11/1855229.shtml?tid=110&tid=1…
> Last month the Croatian government adopted an open source software
> policy and issued guidelines for developing and using open source
> software in the government institutions. The Croatian government is
> concerned that proprietary software leads to too much dependence on
> the software suppliers. [...]
Is FSFE in touch with Croatian supporters? Is the gov.hr definition of
'open source' anything like the free software definition?
Thanks for any comments,
--
MJ Ray - see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
North End, Lynn, Norfolk, England
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request
If anyone would like to help build a list of notable Free Software
orientated companies, consider contributing here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_software_companies
In Wikipedia, "Categories" are lists of articles that contain a certain
tag. To add articles to the "Free_software_companies" Category, add this
tag:
[[Category:Free software companies]]
to the bottom of an article on a company that fits the definition.
That article also has a discussion page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_talk:Free_software_companies
...which can be used to discuss which articles are appropriate and which are
not. Changing the name of the category is another thing that could be
discussed.
Note that the aim is to make it easier to navigate Wikipedia's free software
related information - this isn't related to GNU Business Network.
Another part of Wikipedia that might be useful, or is a good place to start
as a contributor, is the Free Software portal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software
--
Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by
http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org
I wrote:
> > Mr Stallman, who is probably more "OSI hater" than
"MS hater").
Consider that a joke. What I meant is that pi**ing the
OSI off, by comparing them to the 'New Labour', would
have _probably_ pleased RMS.
I presume you don't live in the UK, so you might or
might not realize that over here being compared to
Tony Blair's entities is not necessarily appreciated.
Ottavio Caruso
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Uk magazine PcPro n.143 recently published an article
about "Free Software", the one that usually gives on
your nerves if you are a frequent user of this mailing
list. My letter to the magazine is also a poor man's
summary of the article:
> Dear Sirs,
>
> your recent article "Free Software and why we avoid
> it", PcPro 143, annoys me a bit.
>
> It's not about whether I agree with it or not; its
> about the way you present information.
>
> Firstly, you confuse your readers by putting 'Free
> Software' (Linux, the Gimp, Firefox, Apache),
> 'freeware' (Ad-Aware, AVG, WinZip Zone Alarm) and
> even the infamous Nigerian 419 scam on the same
> plate.
> Why not involve the paedophiles and Al-Qaeda, while
> you're there?
>
> Then you define Richard Stallman as "Linux
> co-creator", "Microsoft-hating" and "near
> Communist".
> I'll leave that to anyone with access to a search
> engine to determine if it's true or not (by the way,
> what does 'near Communist' mean? Coming from a
> country where the Communist Party had 30% of the
> votes, you are either Communist or not).
>
> Further on it is stated that the OSI (Open Source
> Initiative) was merely an 'image makeover'
> (disputable but legitimate opinion) and you even
> compare it to Tony Blair's New Labour. Now, only
> readers from outside the UK would not realize how
> offensive this statement could be (incidentally, in
> doing that, you could have regained the sympathy of
> Mr Stallman, who is probably more "OSI hater"
> than "MS hater").
>
> In short, given the technical calibre of your
> magazine, I think this is an example of
> disinformation.
>
> Regards
>
> Ottavio Caruso
Ottavio Caruso
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1. SELF project officially launched
2. Second draft of the GPLv3 presented
3. Bernhard Reiter spoke at University of Bayreuth (Germany)
4. Free Software at Campus Party in Valencia (Spain)
5. Experts Meeting on Internet Governance Forum
6. Microsoft fined another 1.5m EUR per day, 280.5m EUR total
7. FSFE servers moved
1. SELF project officially launched
The SELF project has been officially launched with a kick-off meeting in
Amsterdam followed by a one day conference at The Hague. SELF
stands for Scientific Education and Learning in Freedom and will set
up a platform for Free educational materials about Free Software and
Open Standards. The project is funded by the sixth framework programme
of the European Commission and includes partners from Bulgaria, Spain,
Sweden, Germany, India, Argentina and the Netherlands. FSFE is
participating with Georg Greve and Jonas Öberg in all areas of the
project and is responsible for the coordination of all legal issues.
More information is available at
http://www.selfproject.eu
Georg Greve has blogged about the kick off conference:
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/self_kick_off_conference_in_…
2. Second draft of the GPLv3 presented
After seven months of discussion and more than 1000 comments made
through the public consultation process, the Free Software Foundation
has published the second draft for the GNU General Public License
(GPL) Version 3 and the first draft for the GNU Lesser General Public
License (LGPL) Version 3 which is now designed as a set of permissive
exceptions to GPLv3.
Ciarán O'Riordan has prepared a list of changes between the first and
the second draft for GPLv3 as well as a list of changes between the
second draft for GPLv3 and the GPLv2. Both are available via FSFE's
GPLv3 project page:
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/gplv3.en.html
3. Bernhard Reiter spoke at University of Bayreuth (Germany)
Bernhard Reiter was invited by the economics department of the
University of Bayreuth (Germany) to speak about software patents. After
two other speakers gave a general introduction into the topic, he
focused his presentation on the practical implications of software
patentability.
4. Free Software at Campus Party in Valencia (Spain)
The FSFE participated actively in the 10th edition of Campus Party in
Valencia. Stefano Maffulli gave three speeches, talking about FSFE,
the Fellowship program and the threat of DRM. The presentations will be
published shortly on the new Advocacy section of www.fsfe.org.
5. Experts Meeting on Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
One of the outcomes of the United Nations World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS) was the establishment of an Internet
Governance Form (IGF). This forum plans to provide room for discussion
and potential consensus building on various forms of regulation
concerning the Internet. In preparation for this year's first IGF, in
Athens, Greece, FSFE's president Georg Greve participated in a two day
expert meeting to discuss possibilities and challenges that the IGF
creates.
6. Microsoft fined another 1.5m EUR per day, 280.5m EUR total
Due to Microsoft's continued refusal to make its interoperability
information available to competitors, the European Commission fined
Microsoft 1.5m EUR per day retroactively from 16th December 2005. FSFE
has been active in this case since the original investigation in 2001,
working to represent and protect the interests of the Samba Project,
which is by now more than 10 years behind in their implementation of
interoperable software due to Microsoft's protocol manipulation games.
More information available at
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2006q3/000147.html
7. FSFE servers moved
On the 20th and 21st of July, the servers hosting most of the FSFE
infrastructure were moved to Örebro University in Sweden who graciously
has donated rack space and bandwidth for the servers. The FSFE would
like to express our thanks to Örebro University for providing these
facilities, as well as our deepest thanks to Göteborg University, who
previously provided the bandwidth and rack space.
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html