Discussion March 2007

discussion@lists.fsfe.org

33 participants
17 discussions

3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows
by Sean DALY 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

When I booked my flight to Barcelona last June, I filled out a form served by a Windows server. Each phone call I made was on a proprietary-software GSM device, routed through a Microsoft partner telco. The MiniDV camcorder which I used to film the conference has proprietary, closed firmware and the codec is patent-encumbered. I captured the video on a nonfree system before transcoding it to Ogg Theora with Free Software. The calculations were of course performed by a microprocessor designed with proprietary software tools. What I want to say is that we have a far way to go yet to further the cause of Free Software in hardware and embedded systems, so we have to start somewhere. Educating/counseling/encouraging manufacturers ready to make the transition and making gadgets available to developers are, to my mind, good ways to start. All this raffle kerfuffle! I mean, will anyone confuse a raffle with formal certification of a device? Perhaps the marketing needs tuning: "This Device Needs Liberation"

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Re: Delivery reports about your e-mail
by The E-Mail Robot for 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

I will be away from the office until March 15th. My email address between Dec. 20th and Jan. 29th will be steve.cande(a)nbp.usap.gov and between Feb. 3rd and March 12th will be scande(a)rv-melville.ucsd.edu Steve

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Re: 3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows
by Sean DALY 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

>> It is a terrible way to start Alfred - where do you suggest we start? * Lobbying for mandated free software in government-procured hardware? * Boycotting every company which distributes hardware containing proprietary software? * Refusing to use any hardware containing nonfree software? * Raising funds to pay Free Software developers to work on reverse-engineering devices? * Raising funds to buy hundreds of nonfree gadgets for study by Free developers? * Creating a startup on the basis of a revolutionary idea: a totally Free GSM phone or PDA? I believe most companies value the GPL first because it guarantees a level playing field for a superior development methodology, and second because it is the right thing to do. That's the nature of business. Seen in this light, a manufacturer does not operate in a vacuum, but facing competitors. I think great strides could be made if competitors could "disarm" simultaneously. It's what we are slowly but surely seeing throughout the software industry and I feel sure the embedded and gadget industries will follow suit. The near-total absence of Free GSM phones and PDAs is, I think, largely because the manufacturers and their partners the telcos remain better able to make high margins on proprietary gadgets. A successful Free gadget would break the mold, but to be Free, developers need experience. So what's the suggestion?

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DELL wants to listen to YOUR needs regarding GNU/Linux
by Joachim Jakobs 14 Mar '07

14 Mar '07

so please help them:) http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/linux

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FSFE Newsletter
by Free Software Foundation Europe 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa 2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows 3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium) 4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland) 5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli 6. System administration murphy weeks 7. Get Active: Join the SELF project! 1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa Making Free Software projects legally maintainable is increasingly important. This includes maintaining the ability to relicence, ensure licence compliance, and to ensure clean copyright. FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment carefully crafted to help Free Software projects consolidate their copyright to a single organisation or person. http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html The FLA was originally developed and released in 2002 with a grant to allow people use the agreement for their own purposes. FSFE has now released a new revision of the FLA under the terms of both the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) license. Project can choose to either apply to be part of FSFE's Fiduciary Programme and make use of the legal network of the Freedom Task Force or adapt the FLA to consolidate copyright into their own organisation using their own legal experts. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.html 2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows As it did in the past years, FSFE wants to thank all Fellows for their support, which is essential in making its work possible. For this purpose, several companies sponsored hardware and books of the 2007 Fellowship raffle, which will be held 1 April 2007. FSFE would like to thank all the companies that donated the gadgets and is happy to pass these gifts on to its supporters. http://www.fsfe.org/raffle http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000170.html If you wish to become an essential part of all the activities of FSFE and would also like to get your chance to win some of the many gadgets, join the Fellowship now: http://www.fsfe.org/join 3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium) Like the years before, the Free Software Foundation Europe was present with a booth at FOSDEM, one of the biggest Free Software conferences in Europe. This year, FSFE shared the booth with its Spanish associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation. Shane Coughlan presented the Freedom Task Force in a lightning talk, and Georg Greve held the closing talk titled "Beyond GPLv3". An amazing total number of twenty members and volunteers of FSFE shared the work on the booth, answered questions, and talked to interested people. You can find some more information, some pictures and links to the video recordings in the following blog entries: http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/life_after_fosdem http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/podcast_interviews_wi… 4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland) Ciarán O'Riordan represented FSFE at a computer science conference named SkyCon. He spoke about GPLv3, presenting the current state and the work ahead. 5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli FSFE's first intern in FSFE's Zürich office and Freedom Task Force, Maria Luisa Carli, had to go back to Italy just after FOSDEM to finish her studies with an additional course. Marilu is planning to stay involved in FSFE's activities, though. http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/mlc981/marilu_s_blog 6. System administration murphy weeks February was a dark month of system administration at FSFE, starting when one of its core servers going down due to a double hard disk crash in the system RAID-1 array, followed by an almost simultaneous network outage at the backup location, making all backups inaccessible. This not only took down FSFE's main web site, but also that of our Latin American sister, which we are supporting with a virtual server. With some work we managed to get things back to operational state on another machine, and will hopefully be able to bring the crashed server back to life soon. FSFE's infrastructure is mainly volunteer-organised, including the Fellowship portal, the further evolution of which is mainly held back by lack of administrator and developer time. If you wish to volunteer to help on these issues and could maybe even see yourself getting involved more deeply, please get in touch with either: fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org system-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org 7. Get Active: Join the SELF project! SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is a project to develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards. It will also try to fill this platform with some initial material. The project is funded by the European Commission for a period of two years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008. http://www.selfproject.eu/ During the first half year, the focus was on the analysis of existing material. Now, the implementation phase starts, both for the platform (developed at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai) and the conversion of existing material. FSFE has set up a mailing list for coordination of FSFE's work: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self There is also a general mailing list for the SELF project: http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion So if the project sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the mailing lists, and contribute to the work! You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html

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Fwd: [openmoko-announce] Crossroads
by Stefano Spinucci 13 Mar '07

13 Mar '07

I'm forwarding a message from the openmoko-announce list. I think someone on the thread "3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows" maybe interested to this... bye --- Stefano Spinucci FSFE Fellow ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sean Moss-Pultz <sean(a)openmoko.com> Date: Mar 13, 2007 5:51 PM Subject: [openmoko-announce] Crossroads To: community <community(a)lists.openmoko.org>, announce(a)lists.openmoko.org Dear Community, OpenMoko is built around the philosophy that far more knowledge exists outside the walls of a corporation than within. Internally, we're struggling with two issues. So we're throwing this out, hoping that some of you have can help us move past our current crossroads: 1) We can't find a WiFi Chipset with GPL'ed drivers -- We know this has been discussed (to death) on this list, but as we're beginning work on the next summer hardware refresh we still can't seem to find a vendor that meets our strict requirements: Namely, we refuse to put anything binary in the kernel. Marvell has some nice for larger devices (the 8388). But we need one specifically for mobile phones (like the 8686). If somebody can help us find the right vendor, we'll give you a free Neo1973. If you're a vendor and want to work with us to GPL your driver, we'll give you lots of business -- and a free phone ;-) 2) We don't have enough UI / Application developers -- If anybody meets (or knows somebody who can meet) the following qualifications: * >= 2 years experience with GTK * object oriented design and implementation w/ GObject * experience with writing GUI applications from scratch, * has software quality assets like: o writing maintainable and reusable code o refactoring o design patterns o identifying and extracting common application code into frameworks Familiarity with collaborative development tools such as: * bugtracker, * source control management, * wiki, * mailing lists is a necessity. We've love to talk with you! Please email coreteam(a)openmoko.org with links to your previous work and a resume if you have one. (The latter is nowhere near as important as the former.) Thanks in advance for any help! -Sean

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Ethipat - the Campaign for Ethical Patents is an initiative of the FFII
by Stefano Spinucci 04 Mar '07

04 Mar '07

from the site http://www.ethipat.org * About Ethipat * The Campaign for Ethical Patents is an initiative of the FFII. The FFII is a non-profit organisation dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology, by the removal of barriers to competition. In 2005, CNET awarded the FFII the Outstanding contribution to Software Development award for this work. * Frequently Asked Questions * Why Europe, not the World? It's a start. Why "Ethics"? Ethics is our sense of justice, our sense of the balance in a relationship. When a law or system treats many people unfairly, it's unethical. People have abused the term, saying "business ethics", which is an oxymoron like "military intelligence" or "industrial action". Businesses do not have a sense of ethics unless they are very small, or run by very clever and dominant people who understand that balance and fairness can be good for profits. Surely "ethics" is totally subjective? We've defined ethics in terms of discrimination. If we argue against a system or law because we don't like it, we're being subjective. But if argue against it because it treats certain people unfairly, we're being objective. Ethics, when framed like this, is not philosophy, but a real yardstick that we can use to measure the balance, and overall value, of any social system, partnership, agreement, contract, etc. What's the point? To collect a lot of signatures, and to push for a new EU patent directive that fixes the mess created by the European Patent Office over the last years. How can I help? Send a poster to a friend and ask them to sign the petition. If you go to an event where you think people will care, print out some posters and hand them around.

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Discussion March 2007