= FSFE Newsletter – October 2014 =
[ Read online: https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201410.fi.html ]
== Italian Court supports unbundling of software and hardware ==
When buying a laptop, it can be difficult to avoid paying for a
Microsoft Windows licence since many laptops come bundled with one. This
“Windows Tax” has artificially increased hardware prices for Free
Software users who do not want to use Microsoft's operating system. We
as Free Software users want to support the development of Free Software
instead of non-free software like Microsoft Windows.
Since 2008 we maintain a wiki page with advice for consumers who want to
avoid funding the development of non-free software[1], and for over a
decade we talked with politicians and consumer protection organisations
about this topic. Nonetheless, there is only slow progress on the
subject, and it will take years to change this situation in Europe. For
such long term goals, reaching intermediate goals is important. Last
month we had such a victory.
Italy's High Court ruled[2] that a laptop buyer was entitled to receive
a refund for the price of the Microsoft Windows licence he was forced to
purchase with his computer. The judges sharply criticised the practice
of selling PCs only together with a non-free operating system as “a
commercial policy of forced distribution”. The court considered this
practice as “monopolistic in tendency”. It also highlighted that the
practice of bundling means that end users are forced to use additional
non-free applications due to compatibility and interoperability issues,
whether they want these programs or not.
Now the Italian authorities have to turn this ruling into a real win for
consumers, by ensuring that computer buyers can choose their device with
any operating system they want, or none. Afterwards we hope that we can
convince other countries in Europe to follow the example set by Italy,
or that we find a European-wide solution to the problem.
== European public administrations using Free Software ==
Often there is a tendency in the media and also from us to concentrate
on the bad news about Free Software usage in the public administration.
In this edition, we will concentrate on good examples from last month
instead. So there is good news concerning Free Software office suites:
Austria's Bundesrechenzentrum, the federal government-owned computing
centre, praises the wide range of application uses of Apache
OpenOffice[3]. They appreciate that the “solution can be adapted to the
data centre's needs, integrated in its specialist applications and also
allows documents to be created and submitted automatically and semi-
automatically. OpenOffice is the standard office suite at the computing
centre since 2008, installed on 12000 PCs across the organisation.”
Furthermore, the public administrations of the Italian cities Todi and
Terni are switching to LibreOffice[4]. They follow the example of the
Italian province of Perugia, using LibreOffice on all of its 1200 PCs
and the Perugia Local Health Authority, which installed the office suite
on 600 PCs.
The French public administration is using a Free Software office suite
on 500,000 desktops[5]. Although they said switching to Free Software
was hard, they were able to handle the problems. The project's success
is partly due to two contracts the ministries have with ICT service
providers. The contracts entail support for 260 Free Software
applications, and the support team ensures that patches made for the
ministries are contributed back to the software projects.
The Greens in Saxony/Germany urge the federal state government to do a
feasibility study on migrating to Free Software[6]. “The political
group, free software users themselves since December 2011, say that
lower IT costs and advantages in IT security should drive public
administrations” to use Free Software. They argue that the dependency on
proprietary software “gives large corporations access to and influence
on official internal workflows, as well as sensitive communication and
data of the state's citizens.”
== Something completely different ==
- Even without the Windows tax mentioned above, you still have to find
out if the computer you want to buy works with Free Software. To
improve the information which hardware is compatible, the FSF and
Debian now cooperate to expand and enhance the hardware database
h-node[7] to help users learn and share information about computers
that work with Free Software operating systems.
- On our English public mailinglist a discussion about good metaphors
for Free Software is currently taking place. Hugo Roy started the
thread[8] with some examples. Alessandro Rubini had some critical
remarks, arguing against the metaphors mentioned[9]. He argues that if
we need a metaphor to explain Free Software to people, we need to
remain in the field of information, of knowledge that can be spread at
no cost. In a recent post Guido Arnold reported good experiences with
using the recipe analogy with children[10].
- On this year's Software Freedom Day several local FSFE groups were
involved: Edgar Hoffmann organised an info booth in front of the
Offenburg town hall, and a mini-community-conference with talks and
our Free Software quiz in the evening[11] (in German, but with lots of
pictures). Dominic Hopf, our Hamburg coordinator, gave a talk at SFD
event in Kiel about F-Droid[12], while Torsten Grote introduced people
to F-Droid at the Berlin SFD event. Also present at this event were
Nermin Canik from Istanbul and your editor to talk with people about
software freedom. Moreover, Michael Stehmann gave a talk about Free
Software and privacy at the SFD event in Cologne[13] (in German).
- From 13 to 15 October the FSFE will have a booth at Linuxcon in
Düsseldorf. As many Free Software activists will already be around
before, our Düsseldorf Fellowship group invites all Free Software
supporters to brunch on 10 October 2014 starting from 11:00 am at
bistro "Schwesterherz"[14], Bilker Allee 66, 40219 Düsseldorf. Thus, a
very active time for our local group there, after participating at a
cryptoparty for the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of
Information[15] (in German) and organising a booth at Zackk street
festival[16] (in German).
- Guido Arnold summarised the outcome of FSFE's work shop in Essen, in
which we discussed best practices for doing advocacy work on a local
level[17].
- The Free Software developer Matthew Garret is “solidly convinced that
Free Software that does nothing to respect or empower users is an
absolute waste of time”. In his blog[18] he argues that we need to
design software from the ground up in such a way that those freedoms
provide immediate and real benefits to our users. In his opinion,
anything else is a failure.
- From the planet aggregation[19]:
- Guido Arnold reports from the Teckids workshops at FrOSCon9. More
than 60 children from 9 to 13 participated in three different
workshops about robots, python games and Blender[20].
- Max Mehl explains how to use Openstreetmap as default in
Thunderbird’s contacts[21] and how to access ownCloud contacts'
birthdays via CalDAV calendar[22].
- Henri Bergius reports from the status of the NoFlo development
environment[23], a user interface for Flow-Based programming.
- There are some steps you can take in order to avoid having to deal
with Microsoft Office files. However, in some cases you will be
forced to deal with them. Kevin Keijzer documented how to make the
best out of Microsoft Office files as Free Software user[24].
- Our current intern Michele Marrali wrote a blog post on how
patents, copyright and trademarks can be used to promote freedom
in Hardware projects[25].
== Get active: Give feedback about the User Data Manifesto ==
Version 2 of the User Data Manifesto[26] has been released. The aim of
this manifesto is to define the fundamental rights for users on their
own data in the Internet age: to control access to their data (and
metadata), to know how and where the data is stored and to be free to
choose a platform. Some projects are already working towards supporting
the manifesto to give their users these rights! At the moment, version 2
is published as a draft on a wiki allowing public comments[27].
We ask all Free Software supporters to give feedback on the manifesto,
so it can be further improved upon, and we can decide whether we want to
support it as FSFE. Please give feedback yourself, discuss the manifesto
on our discussion lists[28], and ask other Free Software organisations
for feedback and if they would support it in this form, too.
Thanks to all the volunteers[29], Fellows[30] and corporate donors[31]
who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
--
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1. https://wiki.fsfe.org/WindowsTaxRefund
2. https://fsfe.org/news/2014/news-20140912-01.fi.html
3. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/103311
4. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/104084
5. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/103567
6. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/103307
7. https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-and-debian-join-forces-to-help-free-software-u…
8. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2014-September/010265.html
9. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2014-September/010295.html
10. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2014-October/010296.html
11. https://blogs.fsfe.org/fast_edi/?p=476
12. http://blog.dmaphy.de/2014/09/software-liberty-is-like-security-in-it.html
13. https://blogs.fsfe.org/stehmann/?p=1258
14. http://www.bistro-schwesterherz.de/
15. https://blogs.fsfe.org/stehmann/?p=1227
16. https://blogs.fsfe.org/stehmann/?p=1247
17. https://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/2014/09/how-to-advocate-for-free-software-in-l…
18. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32686.html
19. http://planet.fsfe.org
20. https://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/2014/09/teckids-workshops-at-froscon9-robots-p…
21. http://blog.mehl.mx/2014/setting-openstreetmap-as-default-in-thunderbird-co…
22. http://blog.mehl.mx/2014/birthday-calendar-with-owncloud-via-caldav/
23. http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/flowhub-kickstarter-delivery/
24. https://blogs.fsfe.org/the_unconventional/2014/09/12/ooxml/
25. http://blogs.fsfe.org/puster/2014/09/08/freedom-and-openness-in-hardware/
26. https://userdatamanifesto.org/2.0/
27. http://udm.branchable.com/index.en.html
28. https://fsfe.org/contact/community.fi.html
29. https://fsfe.org/contribute/contribute.fi.html
30. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/join
31. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.fi.html