Hey all,
irregardless of the split in our community between privacy pragmatists
and privacy absolutists, I think we should take note of this step
Mozilla has taken, as I believe FSFE still has a Facebook page (last
active on September 21st as far as I can ascertain).
> Dear global community we’ve had the opportunity to interact with over the past several years here:
>
> We’re taking a break from Facebook.
>
> At Mozilla we champion platforms and technologies that are good for the web and good for the people that use it.
> We stand up for transparency and user control because they make the web healthier for us all.
>
> That’s why we are pressing pause on any Facebook activity. Mark Zuckerberg has just promised to improve Facebook’s settings and make them more protective, which is a start! Please do that! But we can’t help but think we’ve heard it before, so we’re still going to wait and see what materializes before we resume spending our ad dollars or time here.
>
> IN THE MEANTIME:
> If you need support for Firefox or want to tweet at us, you can find us here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/
> and https://twitter.com/mozilla
(Non-tracked link to the source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180323091845/https://de-de.facebook.com/mozil…)
What do you guys think?
Best regards,
Jonke
There is an interesting article on LWN about Free Software and voting:
https://lwn.net/Articles/797557/
Several commenters argued that electronic voting itself should not be
done. E.g. one of the first commenters (Roberto) wrote that:
It is indeed pretty sad to see that in 2019 we still need to explain,
again and again, why electronic voting is not feasible. I have been
involved in public debate about electronic voting since the early
2000, when it was unfortunately introduced in France. Here is a
recent summary of the key points, in English, that should make a nice
reading.
http://www.dicosmo.org/MyOpinions/index.php?post/2016/02/25/A-rule-of-thumb…
Do you agree with this criticism or what do you think about that topic?
Best regards,
Matthias
PS: Btw. there was also a good episode of John Oliver explaining this to
a broader audience: $youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
--
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/support)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) Weblog k7r.eu/blog.html
Hello all,
In this third episode of our software freedom podcast we speak with our
guest is Harald Welte about mobile phone communication and the general
status of Free Software in this area:
https://fsfe.org/news/podcast/episode-3.en.html
Best regards,
Matthias
--
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/support)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) Weblog k7r.eu/blog.html
Hi everybody,
In the blog about fellowship elections being cancelled[1], the
fellowship has been likened to a corporate donor.
A similar comparison was made in the invitation to the extraordinary
general assembly.
On the transparency page[2], there is a link to donor information[3]
where FSFE identifies the significant corporate donors, especially those
who contribute more than 10% of the budget.
The fellowship appears to contribute[4] about a third of the budget,
more than any other single donor. That was almost EUR 190,000 in 2016
A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were
not identified publicly. Every corporate donor who contributes over 10%
is named publicly. Does anybody feel that the same transparency
principle should apply in cases such as bequests?
Corporate donors (whether they are publicly listed or private companies)
typically have to publish some information publicly, at a bare minimum,
we can see in which country they are domiciled and who their directors are.
I feel it is a good idea to publish more details about FSFE membership
and fellowship. In comparison, while at RMLL, I was at the session
about April where they announced that they have 4,000 members[5] and
clarified that these are all full members of the association with a
right to vote.
FSFE currently publishes[6] the names of all legal members (GA members),
there are 29. FSFE has not directly published statistics about the
fellowship though, although the page[7] about the last elections showed
there were 1,532 people eligible to vote.
There is a weekly report circulated in the team mailing list that gives
a membership breakdown by country. As fellowship representative, I feel
that the information in this report is quite important for the
fellowship at large. I also feel that it is important for other reasons:
- giving volunteers transparency, the same details that GA and team are
aware of
- being consistent with the availability of information about the
corporate donors (e.g. we can see where corporate donors are domiciled,
so it is important to know where the fellows are predominantly domiciled)
- as the "E" in FSFE is for Europe, I feel it is important to
demonstrate the extent to which FSFE is engaged in each European country
The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list
stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly. I notice that
the fellowship numbers had been increasing last year but in the last few
months it has been decreasing. Personally, I suspect that two factors
may be responsible:
- the renaming of "fellow" to "supporter", many of the email templates
and web pages only started using the new term in the last few months.
I personally feel this is a downgrade, as a fellow is by definition a
member of a fellowship while a supporter is a more external role. Other
people may have had the same feeling and quit.
- increasing awareness about the GA decision[8] in October to begin the
process of abolishing elections
There is also a report circulated each week about mailing list
subscriptions. I notice in this report that there is a strong
correlation between the number of fellows in each country and the number
of mailing list users in each country. The blog[1] about removing the
elections asserts that fellows are a "purely financial contributor" but
if they are active in the mailing list and volunteering, I feel that
statement does not adequately describe the fellowship and it is even
more critical to have details on the transparency page and to ensure the
GA meeting in October puts in place a new procedure for community
members to vote.
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
2. https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html
3. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.en.html
4. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html
5. https://www.april.org/association#Chiffres_cles
6. https://fsfe.org/about/team.en.html
7. http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_29119d29f759bbf8
8. https://danielpocock.com/our-future-relationship-with-fsfe-2018
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen (Agency for Digitisation) in Denmark have
created an accessibility product called "acces for all" og "adgang for
alle", which is basically a screen reader. It's available for Windows
and MacOS, and for GNU/Linux-based operating systems it will work with
an extension for Chrome or Chromium:
https://adgangforalle.dk/
Basically, it's a Danish screen reader for people who are visually
impaired, including the blind.
It's available for download and anyone is free to use it, however it is
published under a very restrictive proprietary license.
Among the conditions in the license are
* Non-commercial use
* No copying or distribution of any kind, under threat of "serious civil
and penal legal consequences".
* No distribution within an organisation - an organisation such as e.g.
a library may *not* have the program on its servers in order to install
it on public-facing clients.
There's one very curious thing about this product: Often, organizations
have software made by private vendors, and the private vendors will
retain their copyright and their right to keep it proprietary. In this
case, it's the Agency for Digitisation *itself* that claims the
copyright and threatens with draconian consequences to anyone who dares
use their product e.g. on the job and not just in their spare time.
So it's Danish people's tax money preventing Danish people from using,
let alone sharing, studying and improving this software - created by
Danish tax money - and once again, it's us as taxpayers who are
financing the very agency that's withholding this software from the public.
I find it surreal and close to a textbook example of how *not* to do things.
Best regards,
Carsten
Hi all,
I'm sure many of you are aware that students at all levels of education
are forced to use nonfree software, and more recently, nonfree network
services in order to receive their education and fulfil the course
requirements (see https://www.gnu.org/education/ for prior writings on
this).
I'm having a bad day today because I'm currently a studying at a
programme that is an exception to the above, with a lot of focus on
using free software. But for some reason, a tutorial today was behind a
Google sign-in wall and the lecturer didn't want to export the tutorial
(which is just a jupyter notebook file) and upload it on the existing
learning management system for students to download and study.
This led me to imagine some possible ways in which the FSFE and/or other
organisations in the free software movement could try to work on this
topic:
1. A survey of students and instructors about their experiences and/or
policies in mandatory nonfree software and nonfree network services in
university classrooms (which can establish the magnitude of the problem,
and help identify ways to change this)
2. A campaign for instructors to pledge not to mandate the use of
nonfree software and network services and/or eliminate them from the
curriculum of their courses
Apologies for the hastily written email, but if anyone in the list is
interested in this topic, I'd love to here more.
Best,
Dem
--
Demetris Karayiannis
Linguistics, University of Eastern Finland
Homepage URL: dkarayiannis.eu