October Newsletter /Summit

[Werner Koch]

Hi,

reading the "FSFE Newsletter - October 2016" [1]

  We're still not over how cool it was to see so many from our community
  join the FSFE Summit in September. It was a good experience and we're
  keen to repeat it. [...]

I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a
very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software.  The speaker
of that talk is head of a company selling non-free software but trying
to get associated with Free Software.  In the F&Q after the talk the
speaker was asked about this (35'50'' into the video) and confirmed that
their software is and will not be published under a Free Software
license.  He also said that he did not think cloud services should at
all require Free Software, be it GPL or BSD.

I am quite surprised to see such a talk at an FSFE conference.  In
particular because the talk was not described as giving a counterpoint
to Free Software.  It was a straight ad talk and that should have been
known to the program committee: For example, the FSFE president was
recently guest at one of their dinner events and before that he had
asked me about my opinion on that company (I once gave a keynote at one
of their events).

A newsletter should not be silent about topics which can at least be
called controversial and have been called in as an agenda topic for
tomorrow's FSFE general assembly.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner



[1] https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201610.en.html
[2] https://conf.qtcon.org/en/qtcon/public/events/581

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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