Dear all,
In the spirit of full disclosure, let me start by pointing out that I am CEO
and - along with other employees, some of whom you will also know -
shareholder of Kolab Systems AG (https://kolabsystems.com) and that Kolab
Systems has been the driving force behind Roundcube for the past years.
Kolab Systems has also agreed to help the Roundcube Next team in its aim to
refactor and build the next technology generation.
So I am not neutral.
That said, I genuinely believe it is extremely important for the Free Software
community to get behind Roundcube Next and help us push it forward, as
well as bring others on board with it.
The longer story is here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=676
TL;DR, Part I: As a community we *require* technologies that compete with
Google Apps, Office 365 and the likes in features, convenience, UI/UX, yet
provide full control and freedom to users.
TL;DR, Part II: Application Service Providers should get on board with that
push *right now* because otherwise they will find themselves forced into
becoming re-sellers for Office 365 and Google Apps -- and increasingly
unable to compete with their features & networking effects.
Some already understood this, and have joined the Roundcube Next community,
such as cPanel (http://blog.cpanel.com/on-to-the-next/), Tucows, and now also
Fastmail (http://blog.fastmail.com/2015/06/05/fastmail-supports-roundcube-next-develo…).
But there are many more providers using Roundcube today who have not joined,
nor have they contributed in the past. For them it should be obvious to join.
And then there are those that have their own home-brew interfaces (such as
Fastmail) who get the unique opportunity to become part of a new, growing
community that will create a technology that will make them fully competitive
against the "big clouds" in 18 months from now.
Unfortunately, most of them have not realized this yet.
So unless your provider is cPanel, Tucows, Fastmail or Kolab Now, all of who
are part of this already, please encourage them to step up and join the
community to push for Roundcube Next.
Direct link for your convenience:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/roundcube-next--2/x/4658765#/story
Best regards,
Georg
--
Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)fsfeurope.org>
Member of the General Assembly
http://fsfe.org/about/greve/http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/http://identi.ca/greve
At the end of last week, the White House published a draft for a Source
Code Policy <https://sourcecode.cio.gov/SourceCodePolicy.pdf>. The
policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build
software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the
general public to use, study, share and improve the software. As we want
to push for similar policies in the EU, I would be very interested in
your feedback.
The Source Code Policy is intended for efficient use of US taxpayers'
money and reuse of existing custom-made software across the public
sector. It is said to reduce vendor lock-in of the public sector, and
decrease duplicate costs for the same code which in return will increase
transparency of public agencies. The custom-build software will also be
published to the general public either as public domain, or as Free
Software so others can improve and reuse the software.
The policy in general does not require that already existing
custom—developed software be retroactively made available as Free
Software if it was developed by third party developers (though it is
strongly encouraged to the extent permissible under existing contracts).
However, it is encouraged to be retroactively applicable for the
existing custom-build software developed by agency employees in the
course of their official duties.
As a result, the draft predicts that the policy will contribute to
economic growth and innovation, as the public will be able to use and
improve the software which was funded with public money.
Until 11 April 2016 the public can comment the draft
<https://sourcecode.cio.gov/>. So please sent us any comments asap.
--
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030 | (fsfe.org/donate)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) - Weblog (k7r.eu/blog.html)
Hello everybody,
Here's a quick update on the upgrade/migration of FSFE's Wiki [1] and
the little group of "Caretakers" who wanted to focus on reorganizing and
improving the content of it.
Technical questions, reporting bugs, etc should still be reported to web
<at> fsfeurope.org
The group of CareTakers, which you may join any time btw, collects plans
and ideas on their dedicated name space in the wiki [2]. You may join
our discussions on our QuickML [3] either to point something out or to
offer help.
While we are working on pages, we agreed to chitchat about it on the
Fellowship XMPP MUC [4].
Greetings,
Guido
PS: I'll send a similar note to fsfe-de@ mailinglist. Feel free to
spread the word into mailing lists in other languages, too!
[1] https://wiki.fsfe.org/FSFE%20Fellowship%20Wiki
[2] https://wiki.fsfe.org/WikiAdmin/WikiCaretakers
[3] WikiCareTakers<at>q.fsfe.org
More info on QuickML: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/quickml
[4] fellowship(a)conference.jabber.fsfe.org
More info on FSFE MUC: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Migrated/XMPP
--
Sent with my mobile and K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevety.
http://freeyourandroid.org
Dear all,
Maybe you heard of the Radio Equipment Directive already. It's a
directive passed by the European Parliament forcing radio device
manufacturers (routers, mobile phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS...) from
around 2017 on to check every software able to run on the respective
devices to be compliant with applicable radio laws (e.g. frequency or
strenght).
Seeming to be reasonable at first sight, this directive will cause huge
damage to Free Software, innovation, security, fair competition,
volunteering and more. We have been in contact with many actors around
this issue since a few months already; now we published our official
information page about the EU Radio Directive, trying to summarise all
necessary background info, bad consequences, and recommendations how to
improve the situation:
https://fsfe.org/activities/radiodirective/
Please share your thoughts on this issue, and please also speak with
friends and colleagues about it. Feel free to help us gathering more
information and share it on this list or with me directly. Thanks!
Best regards,
Max
P.S.: In the USA, the FCC wants to push a quite similar law. Let us try
to at least protect Europe from such damage, and let's hope the US
activists will be successful as well.
--
Max Mehl - Coordinator German FSFE Team - www.fsfe.org
More contact possibilities: http://fsfe.org/about/mehl
Private blog: blog.mehl.mx | Private homepage: mehl.mx
Your donation enables our work: http://fsfe.org/donate
Hi!
Since we had some breakage in FSFE group wiki page links recently, I thought
I'd make myself popular and propose another change ;-)
As you can see in the new wiki, local groups[1] are currently in simple list.
IMO, this representation is far from optimal.
My proposal is to add the country code (or maybe the country/region name) to
the wiki name:
LocalGroups/AT/Vienna
LocalGroups/DE/Stuttgart
This would, for example, allow us to have portal pages which list all groups
in a given country.
So, what do you say?
Cheers,
Johannes
[1] https://wiki.fsfe.org/LocalGroup
Hello everybody,
During our first virtual European Coordinators Meeting, we realized that
we should establish a team to take care of the wiki. There is a lot of
great information on there, but some of it is hard to find, some of it
is outdated, and some material is not so good at all. So we want to set
up a group, the wiki caretakers, to go through the wiki, find the
necessary tasks and then take care of them.
If you would like to support us in this effort, just send me an email so
we can coordinate. I set up a pad with some suggestions [1]; please
have a look. Please do not perform all of these changes yet; some of
them need some more discussion. Feel free to leave any comments on the
pad if you disagree with a point I made.
If the pad should not be enough for organizing the team at any point, we
can set up a Quick ML mailing list. Just let me know.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you. :-)
Happy hacking!
Florian
[1] https://public.pad.fsfe.org/p/wiki_caretakers
--
www: https://wiki.fsfe.org/Fellows/floriansnow █▉
e-mail: floriansnow(a)fsfe.org █▉█▉█▉
xmpp: floriansnow(a)jabber.fsfe.org ▉▉