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
Georg Greve has blogged about the kick off conference:
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/self_kick_off_conference_in_t...
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