= FSFE Newsletter - April 2015 =
[ Read online: https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201504.fi.html ]
== Jonas Öberg visiting Boston without a pink backpack ==
Our new Executive Director Jonas Öberg[1] gave a talk at Libreplanet,
and visited Boston to meet FSF board members and staff. In his blog
posts[2] he wrote about his meetings with Matthew Garret, Benjamin Mako
Hill, Bradley Kuhn, Henry Poole from FSF's board, FSF's staff as well as
FSF's Executive Director John Sullivan discussing how to improve
cooperation and the two main challenges he sees for FSFE:
- analysing Free Software from legal, technical, and social dimensions
and ensuring that any challenges to Free Software within those areas
are met,
- assuring that in a world of free and open everything, Free Software is
what ties everything together: you can not have open data, open
ecology, open government or open educational resources without Free
Software.
Furthermore he looks back to his first visit, at that time in his
capacity as GNU webmaster, in December 1999 with a pink backpack.
== FSFE supporting the Christoph Hellwig GNU GPL enforcement lawsuit ==
FSFE welcomes the action which Christoph Hellwig and the Software
Freedom Conservancy are taking[3] to bring VMware into compliance with
the GNU General Public License.
Free Software is a public resource, and it is governed by legal rules
and social norms. Anyone who draws on this resource without respecting
those rules and norms damages the community at large. The great majority
of such problems are successfully resolved through dialogue and
goodwill. It is only when dialogue fails that legal steps become
necessary in order to protect this resource which we all share.
While FSFE regrets that this lawsuit has arisen, we believe that
safeguarding Free Software against those who try to appropriate for
themselves what belongs to us all is of the utmost importance.
== Joint statement on the use of Open Standards in the European Commission ==
Open Standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of
charge and restriction and for which no specific software from a
particular vendor is required. It is important that every EU citizen and
company should have the right to communicate and interact with its
administration using Open Standards exclusively, and not be forced to
install and use software from any specific vendor.
At Document Freedom Day (DFD), the international day to celebrate and
raise awareness of Open Standards, April (the French Free Software
organisation), European Digital Rights (EDRi), Open Forum Europe (OFE),
the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), and FSFE published a joint
statement. Besides generally highlighting the topic, the statement
focuses on the improper use of standards in the context of applying for
EU programmes[4]. (A full report about the 60 DFD events in 31 countries
will be published at the beginning of April.)
== Something completely different ==
- Just how transparent does the European Parliament have to be? In its
own rules of procedure, the Parliament has set itself the high
standard of conducting its affairs in “utmost transparency”. Our
president Karsten Gerloff reports[5] from an interesting discussion
“Ensuring utmost transparency – Free Software and Open Standards under
the Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament”, and what that
means in practice.
- The German Ministry of Economics published a first draft law to ban
compulsory routers (German)[6]. Except missing enforcement measures
FSFE welcomes the draft. We update the timeline[7] and our overview
pages[8] so people outside German could reuse our experiences to fight
compulsory routers in other countries, too.
- At a panel discussion, organised by the European Patent Office, about
patents, standards, and Free Software your editor experienced an
unexpected but positive turn[9].
- The New Yorker notes the 30th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto and
published a longer article about Richard Stallman and the start of GNU
and copyleft[10].
- This year the Free Software Award[11] went to Sébastien Jodogne for
his work on Free software Medical imaging with his project Orthanc and
to Reglue, which gives GNU/Linux computers to underprivileged children
and their families in Austin, Texas.
- FSFE welcomes Nicolas Dietrich in its General Assembly. He was elected
by our sustaining members, and thereby holds one of the two Fellowship
GA seats[12].
- From the planet aggregation[13]:
- Peter Bubestinger explains how he saved the songs of a friend's
iPod with Free Software[14].
- In his new job, former FSFE intern Nicolas Jean published EvQueue,
a job scheduler and queuing engine, as Free Software[15].
- Paul Boddie wrote about the BBC Micro Bit[16], a computing device,
which the BBC plan to give to each child in the UK starting
secondary school.
- Franz Gratzer highlighted some English interviews held during
FOSDEM[17], and wrote about the booth presence of freie.it, which
was founded by some members of FSFE’s Viennese Fellowship group,
as a web platform to help people who are interested in using Free
Software but who do not want to administrate their own computers.
- Fellow Karl Beecher explained why his company Endocode supports
FSFE as silver donor[18], and
- Mirko Böhm, also part of Endocode, wrote about his activites[19],
including meeting with Jonas Öberg, FSFE’s new Executive Director.
- Nico Rikken wrote about his discussions with the Fairphone
producers[20]
- Mario Fux wondered if Konqi -- the KDE mascot -- is male or
female[21].
- And Daniel Pocock explains how you can become your own OpenID
provider[22].
== Get active: Spread the message with Free Software merchandise ==
During the last weeks, many people ordered our “There is no cloud, just
other people's computers” stickers[23]. Now Rich Folsom wrote a Chromium
Browser add-in[24], which converts “the cloud” to “other people's
computers”.
Since so many people like the slogan, we now also have the corresponding
“There is no cloud, just other people's computers”[25] bags in our
webshop. Furthermore we have a new Open Standard t-shirt with robots in
fitted light blue or a non-fitted khaki, the “I love Free Software”
t-shirt in light blue, or a fitted “Hacking for Freedom” t-shirt in
grey, as well as the metallic “GNU/Linux inside” stickers and a golden
GNU pin.
If you want to spread the Free Software message at work, conferences, or
when you are shopping, you can order the equipment on our merchandise
page[26].
Thanks to all the volunteers[27], Fellows[28] and corporate donors[29]
who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE[30]
--
Free Software Foundation Europe <https://fsfe.org>
FSFE News <https://fsfe.org/news/news.en.rss>
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Free Software Discussions <https://fsfe.org/contact/community.en.html>
1. https://fsfe.org/news/2015/news-20150302-02.fi.html
2. http://blogs.fsfe.org/jonas/?p=14
3. http://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html
4. https://fsfe.org/news/2015/news-20150325-01.fi.html
5. https://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2015/03/26/909/
6. http://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/P-R/referentenentwurf-gesetz-zur-ausw…
7. https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/timeline.fi.html
8. https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/routers.fi.html
9. https://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/unexpected-turn-at-panel-discussion-on-software-p…
10. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty
11. https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-award-winners
12. https://fsfe.org/news/2015/news-20150316-01.fi.html
13. http://planet.fsfe.org
14. http://blogs.fsfe.org/pb/?p=147
15. http://blogs.fsfe.org/nicoulas/?p=175
16. https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=878
17. http://blogs.fsfe.org/franz.gratzer/2015/03/01/fosdem-2015-some-interviews/
18. http://computerfloss.com/2015/03/endocode-proud-to-sponsor-free-software-fo…
19. http://creative-destruction.me/2015/03/11/fancy-dinners-cgroups-and-namespa…
20. http://nicorikken.eu/blog/fairphone-back-to-the-drawing-board/
21. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mario/?p=283
22. http://danielpocock.com/the-easiest-way-to-run-your-own-openid
23. https://fsfe.org/contribute/spreadtheword.fi.html#promo-material
24. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-other-peoples-co/kkpbkgb…
25. https://fsfe.org/order/order.fi.html
26. https://fsfe.org/order/order.fi.html
27. https://fsfe.org/contribute/contribute.fi.html
28. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/join
29. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.fi.html
30. https://fsfe.org/index.fi.html