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= FSFE Newsletter - February 2011 =
[Permanent URL: http://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201102.fi.html ]
== Drop a container to free web videos ==
Videos on the internet often prove to be literal nuisance to Free Software users. Several websites required the non-free flash video plugin to view videos. Perhaps also your friends were wondering why you are not able to watch youtube videos within your web browser, and thought you are a freak when you started downloading videos with youtube-dl[1] . With gnash[2] and other programs which are able to play flash video directly the situation improved. But flash is still a pain annoying both for Free Software users and developers.
1. http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/ 2. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
Developing HTML5 turned out to be a chance to purge this problem. It enables the user to play audio and video directly in your web browser. But there was disagreement which video container format should be used: H.264, WebM[3] or Ogg Theora[4] ? MPEG LA organisation requires developers who implement H.264 to agree to a patent license which is incompatible with Free Software. So we might have ended up depending on non-free software again to watch web videos.
3. http://www.webmproject.org/ 4. http://www.theora.org/
But now Google[5] announced to suspend support for patent-encumbered codec H.264 and support free codecs only instead. Being the biggest provider of web videos Google's decision is a huge step to dispose of non- free video software. Our sister organisation FSF issued a press release on this topic[6] and I (Matthias) was interviewed by Dradio Wissen[7] about it (in German).
5. http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html 6. http://www.fsf.org/news/supporting-webm 7. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=719
Now time has come to help adopt WebM as free video format: get in contact with website operators and ask them to distribute videos in the WebM format to get rid of H.264.
== New clothes for FSFE ==
For many people their first contact with FSFE is via website. After months of work by FSFE's Web Team[8] a new website design has been launched including a fresh look, improved infrastructure, and new features. Here is a list of our new features:
8. http://fsfe.org/contribute/web/web.fi.html
- iCal feed[9] of FSFE events and activities - Option to subscribe to FSFE newsletters[10] in multiple languages - Tagging of news and events, allowing dynamic generation of information feeds for specific topics (useful for country pages, and topic homepages such as "EU News"); documentation added[11] - Improved country teams contact page[12] , including more information and links to team member profiles - Improved people page[13] with avatars of team members - New meta-data storage and display system for published articles[14] which consistently presents important article information
9. webcal://fsfe.org/events/events.en.ics 10. http://fsfe.org/news/newsletter.fi.html 11. http://fsfe.org/contribute/web/tagging.fi.html 12. http://fsfe.org/contact/local.fi.html 13. http://fsfe.org/about/team.fi.html 14. http://fsfe.org/projects/os/eifv2.fi.html
== Something completely different ==
- We have written to German competition authorities in order to share our concern about the sale of Novell's patents to a consortium called CPTN made up of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC. Read the details in our press release[15] and Karsten's blog article[16] . - Fellowship Election for GA seat: In February Fellows may choose their candidate for the Fellowship seat in FSFE's General Assembly. Check out the candidates[17] and choose your candidate. If you are not a Fellow yet join now[18] , and you can pick your choice, too. - Fellowship interview: Political veteran Anne Østergaard discusses[19] new ways to influence European legislation, the scale of Free Software support in developing countries, and the importance of local culture in community campaigning. - There is a lot of good things to read[20] . Patents are definetely not something you'll enjoy. If this warning doesn't keep you from reading them, Matija wrote a blog article "Reading patents made easier?"[21] . - Do you want some fries together with FSFE? Like every year we will have a strong booth presence at FOSDEM[22] with several volunteers, project coordinators, our president and vice-president. We are looking forward to having discussions at our booth after Karsten's[23] and my presentation[24] as well as while eating fries, or having a beer with you. - Links on Free Software and Law; FTF team member Matija started publishing legal news on Free Software: Free Software & law related links[25] ( part 2[26] ). - You can do a lot of (nice ;) ) things with handcuffs: Richard wrote about practical advantages[27] of not being handcuffed in your daily life.
15. http://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20110113-02.fi.html 16. http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2011/01/12/why-were-concerned-about-the-sale-o... 17. http://wiki.fsfe.org/election11 18. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/join 19. http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=233 20. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=399 21. http://matija.suklje.name/?q=node/220 22. http://www.fosdem.org/2011/ 23. http://www.fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/powerfreedomsoftware 24. http://www.fosdem.org/2011/schedule/event/nonfreeadvertisement 25. http://matija.suklje.name/?q=node/214 26. http://matija.suklje.name/?q=node/218 27. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/practical.html
== Get active - Join the Web Team ==
FSFE's Web Team needs help! We need new ideas and suggestions as well as developers, designers[28] , and translators[29] to improve fsfe.org even further.
28. http://fsfe.org/contribute/designers/designers.fi.html 29. http://fsfe.org/contribute/translators/translators.fi.html
- Sign up to the Web Team's mailing-list[30] to read discussion about current and future changes, and submit your own queries and comments - Submit bugs with the website to the Web issue tracker[31] (you can create a new account, and remember your usename will end in -guest) - Ask questions in real time in the Web Team's IRC channel: #fsfe-web[32] on freenode
30. http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/web 31. https://trac.fsfe.org/fsfe-web 32. irc://irc.freenode.net/fsfe-web
Regards, Matthias Kirschner - FSFE