The most exciting thing this month is the amount of Fellowship activity we
are seeing around Europe. It's great to see more and more local meetings,
giving Free Software supporters a chance to hang out together and share
views.
I've been lucky enough to attend several of the recent gatherings and what
impresses me most is that our Fellows discuss such a broad range of topics.
People talk about their local area, concerns about digital rights, business
perspectives and ideas for future strategy. It's a dynamic environment to
be working in. I'd love to see more meetings, especially in my own 'home'
countries of Ireland and the UK. If you would like to be involved (whether
you are a Fellow or not) please visit http://fsfeurope.org/contribute/ or
send an email to team(a)fsfeurope.org.
Shane, Zurich Office
1. FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)
2. FSFE at Akademy 2008
3. Swedish Fellows meet for talks and barbecue
4. Fellowship meeting in Nijmegen
5. Fellowship meeting in Duesseldorf
6. Zurich Fellowship meeting
7. New members of FSFE
8. Printable information material available for download
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
9. 'The strategic implementation of Free Software in business' speech at OpenExpo
1. FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)
KDE e.V. decided to adopt a customised version of FSFE's Fiduciary Licence
Agreement (FLA) during their recent general assembly. The FLA is a copyright
assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to
single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal
maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to
re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in
court. KDE Project developers will in the future have the option of copyright
consolidation by assigning code to KDE e.V.
http://dot.kde.org/1218525921/
2. FSFE at Akademy 2008
Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator at FSFE, participated in the 'Driving
innovation with Open Desktop Technologies' at Akademy 2008 on Tuesday, 12
August 2008. Shane was also around the conference for a few days talking
with developers and sharing ideas. Armijn Hemel from gpl-violations.org
was also present, though he was running a USB plugfest rather than focusing
on licensing for this event.
3. Swedish Fellows meet for talks and barbequeue
Eight people were present at the meeting, which took place in
Slottskogen and lasted for about three hours. The weather was nice
enough to have a simple barbecue. Among the many discussion topics
were the usage of free software in non-core parts of businesses, the
BSA's crusade on unlicenced proprietary software as a golden opportunity
for free software and ways to increase visibility and knowledge of free
software for non-technical users. Some time was also devoted to talking
about FSCONS, both in terms of practical information and of long term
strategies. Two of the fellows present at the meeting volunteered to
help out at the conference.
4. Fellowship meeting in Nijmegen
Ciaran O'Riordan (Fellowship Ambassador) and Shane Coughlan (FTF Coordinator)
attended a meeting of the Dutch Fellowship at Café Jos, Daalseweg 309, 6523 CA
Nijmegen on the 28th of August. Adriaan de Groot from KDE was also present,
and in between discussions about KDE 4, the cultural expansion of Free Software
and baking muffins, plenty of beer was consumed. One of the main topics of
discussion was software patents, something that many feel will become a high
profile European political issue once the current European Commissioner's term
comes to an end.
5. Fellowship meeting in Duesseldorf
Ciaran O'Riordan (Fellowship Ambassador) and Shane Coughlan (FTF Coordinator)
attended the latest meeting of the Duesseldorf Fellowship at Gasttaette
"Suedstern", Bilker Allee 66, 40219 Duesseldorf on the 30th of August.
Discussion was lively and ranged from software engineering to usability
and political developments in Germany. As in Nijmegen, some discussions
centred around software patents and what we need to do to ensure we can
address the topic fully.
6. Zurich Fellowship meeting
There was a meeting of the Zurich Fellowship in the FSFE Zurich office on the
15th of August. This is the second meeting for our Fellows at this location,
and this time around we talked about the forthcoming Software Freedom Day
events. Ben, our office intern, is helping to coordinate the distribution
of information at a local university on the day. Shane Coughlan was also
at the meeting and briefed everyone on KDE and the adoption of the FLA.
7. New members of FSFE
The team is proud to welcome Fernanda G. Weiden, the coach for FSFE's
system administration team, and Björn Schießle, the official
coordinator for German translation. Graeme West is the new intern at
the Zürich Office. Congratulations to all these people.
8. Printable information material available for download
A folder with general information about FSFE and Free Software, and some
leaflets with specific information about FSFE's projects and activities
are now available online in HTML and PDF format. Everybody can
download, print, distribute!
http://www.fsfeurope.org/documents/printable/
All the downloadable PDFs are auto-generated from the same sources as the
HTML web pages, using technologies like XSLT and TeX, and of course
built on exclusively Free Software. Curious how that works? Interested
in hacks like this one? Join FSFE's team of webmasters!
http://www.fsfeurope.org/contribute/web/
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
9. 'The strategic implementation of Free Software in business' speech at OpenExpo
Shane Coughlan, FTF coordinator, will deliver a speech entitled 'The strategic
implementation of Free Software in business' at the OpenExpo conference in
Winterthur, Switzerland, on the 25th of September.
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
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