FSFE Newsletter

Free Software Foundation Europe press at fsfeurope.org
Tue Mar 13 22:17:17 UTC 2007


1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
6. System administration murphy weeks
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!


1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa

Making Free Software projects legally maintainable is increasingly 
important.  This includes maintaining the ability to relicence, ensure 
licence compliance, and to ensure clean copyright.

FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment
carefully crafted to help Free Software projects consolidate their 
copyright to a single organisation or person.

  http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html

The FLA was originally developed and released in 2002 with a grant to
allow people use the agreement for their own purposes. FSFE has now
released a new revision of the FLA under the terms of both the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) license. 

Project can choose to either apply to be part of FSFE's Fiduciary
Programme and make use of the legal network of the Freedom Task
Force or adapt the FLA to consolidate copyright into their own
organisation using their own legal experts.  

  http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.html


2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows

As it did in the past years, FSFE wants to thank all Fellows for their
support, which is essential in making its work possible. For this
purpose, several companies sponsored hardware and books of the 2007
Fellowship raffle, which will be held 1 April 2007. FSFE would like to
thank all the companies that donated the gadgets and is happy to pass
these gifts on to its supporters.

  http://www.fsfe.org/raffle
  http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000170.html

If you wish to become an essential part of all the activities of FSFE
and would also like to get your chance to win some of the many
gadgets, join the Fellowship now:

  http://www.fsfe.org/join


3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)

Like the years before, the Free Software Foundation Europe was present
with a booth at FOSDEM, one of the biggest Free Software conferences
in Europe.  This year, FSFE shared the booth with its Spanish
associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation.

Shane Coughlan presented the Freedom Task Force in a lightning talk,
and Georg Greve held the closing talk titled "Beyond GPLv3".  An
amazing total number of twenty members and volunteers of FSFE shared
the work on the booth, answered questions, and talked to interested
people.

You can find some more information, some pictures and links to the
video recordings in the following blog entries:

  http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/life_after_fosdem
  http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/podcast_interviews_with_simon_sun_and_tim_chaos_radio


4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)

Ciarán O'Riordan represented FSFE at a computer science conference
named SkyCon.  He spoke about GPLv3, presenting the current state and
the work ahead.


5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli

FSFE's first intern in FSFE's Zürich office and Freedom Task Force,
Maria Luisa Carli, had to go back to Italy just after FOSDEM to finish
her studies with an additional course. Marilu is planning to stay
involved in FSFE's activities, though.

 http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/mlc981/marilu_s_blog


6. System administration murphy weeks

February was a dark month of system administration at FSFE, starting
when one of its core servers going down due to a double hard disk crash
in the system RAID-1 array, followed by an almost simultaneous network
outage at the backup location, making all backups inaccessible.

This not only took down FSFE's main web site, but also that of our
Latin American sister, which we are supporting with a virtual
server. With some work we managed to get things back to operational
state on another machine, and will hopefully be able to bring the
crashed server back to life soon.

FSFE's infrastructure is mainly volunteer-organised, including the
Fellowship portal, the further evolution of which is mainly held back
by lack of administrator and developer time. If you wish to volunteer
to help on these issues and could maybe even see yourself getting
involved more deeply, please get in touch with either:

  fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
  system-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org


7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!

SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is a project to
develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free
educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards.  It will
also try to fill this platform with some initial material.  The
project is funded by the European Commission for a period of two
years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008.

  http://www.selfproject.eu/

During the first half year, the focus was on the analysis of existing
material.  Now, the implementation phase starts, both for the platform
(developed at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai)
and the conversion of existing material.

FSFE has set up a mailing list for coordination of FSFE's work:

  http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self

There is also a general mailing list for the SELF project:

  http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion

So if the project sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the
mailing lists, and contribute to the work!


You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html



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