[Fsfe-se] [FSFE PR][SV] FSFE Newsletter - August 2013

[press at fsfeurope.org]

Varning: Den här sidan har inte blivit översatt ännu. Vad du ser nedan
är originalversionen av sidan. Använddenna sida för att få information
om hur du kan hjälpa till med översättningar och andra saker.

= FSFE Newsletter - August 2013 =

[Read online: http://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201308.sv.html ]


== Proprietary companies ask European Commission to restrict business
models ==

Because Android is Free Software and gratis, the non-free software
competition cannot compete with it, therefore the market has less
alternatives, thus the consumer suffers from this lack of competition.
In a nutshell that is the argumentation of the so-called "Fair Search"
coalition. Essentially they are asking the European Commission to favour
a restrictive business model over a liberal one, which is exactly the
opposite of what competition regulators should do in order to achieve a
fair market.

Asking the European Commission to cripple Free Software in order to
allow proprietary vendors to sell their locked-down systems is absurd.
Therefore theFSFE has written a letter to the European Commission's
competition authorities to refute the claims, and make it clear that
Free Software is critical for a competitive IT market. In our letter we
ask the European Commission to dismiss the "FairSearch" coalition's
unfounded claims regarding predatory pricing, and not make them part of
whatever steps it decides to take. For further information: our legal
councilCarlo Piana wrote a background article about this case.


== Election software: source code available but not Free Software ==

Estonia has used Internet voting for general elections since 2005. Local
activists have recently managed to convince Estonia's National Electoral
Committee (NEC) to release source code for some of the software under a
non-free licence, but this licence does not permit distribution of
derivative works or commercial use and therefore is non-free. Besides
"[i]mportant system components remain completely unknown to the general
public. One of those components is the client side voting application
that must be loaded and executed on the voter's computer," said Heiki
Ojasild, Fellowship representative in the FSFE's General Assembly inour
press release accompanying ouropen letter to NEC regarding the country's
Internet voting system.

Similar in Norway: Paul Boddie reports about theNorwegian voting and the
illusion of "Open Source", where the published software covers only
"testing, reviewing or evaluating the code", restricts commercial
purposes, and for a lot of things you need a "written approval" from the
vendors.


== NSA leaks motivates Free Software activists ==

For almost two decades the Free Software Foundations have been working
for a society where the power over technology is distributed. We work
for a world in which nobody can prevent others from learning how
computers work. A world in which programmers can work with each other
instead against each other. Nobody should be forced to use a certain
kind of software without being able to adjust it to her own needs
instead of adjusting herself to the software. Everybody should be able
to audit software, to understand what a program does exactly and what
happens to your data.

The Free Software movement wrote a lot of software which respects your
privacy, including encryption and anonymisation software. The FSFE
pushed for Open Standards to prevent monopolies by enabling different
software to work with each other. We promote decentralised systems, so
there is no single point in our infrastructure which has too much power
and which enables you to store the data in a trusted enviroment.

It seems the NSA leaks of the last weeks have strengthened the Free
Software community's will to continue fighting for our freedoms in a
digital society. More people are listening to Free Software programmers
and activists, more people demand Free Software solutions, more people
are using Free Software to protect their privacy, and more people
appreciate Free Software developer's work. E.g.Eva Galperin from EFF
said in her keynote at KDE's conference akademy: "Help us Free Software,
you are our last and only hope". She asked Free Software developers to
build new products, and "save us"! And as you will see below, the Free
Software movement will continue to do so.


== Something completely different ==


- Privacy is a fundamental human right, and is central to maintaining
  democratic societies. The FSFE joined more than 100 other
  organisations indemanding that states respect human rights, and bring
  their surveillance apparatus under democratic control. More than one
  year in the making, the demands are now more relevant than ever. The
  FSFE alsosigned an Open Letter to stop surveillance, which calls for
  twelve political steps including the development and promotion of Free
  Software for digital self-defence.

- The FSFEcommented on leaked documents which show how Microsoft is
  actively cooperating with the NSA.

- Together with the Open Rights Group we sent anopen letter on
  transparency to Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament.
  Mr Schulz has recently been asked to produce a study on transparency
  within the Parliament. In our letter we are offering Mr Schulz our
  help in this effort and suggest several questions, e.g. if the
  Parliament would be obliged to publish the source code of the software
  it uses.

- News about Free Software in education are back:Guido Arnold summarised
  what happened in the education sector during April, May, and June. He
  alsosummarised the relevant parts of the UNESO conference World Summit
  on an Information Society (WSIS+10).

- Ubuntu is aiming to raise $32 million in crowdfunding to produce
  Ubuntu Edge, a mobile computer that can dual-boot between Android and
  Ubuntu GNU/Linux.Our sister organisation the FSF is asking the crucial
  question:Will Ubuntu Edge commit to using only Free Software?. Paul
  Boddie, Fellow and maintainer ofFellowship wiki, looked into the
  question ifUbuntu Edge is making things even harder for open hardware?

- Besidesour sister organisation reports that the New Internationalist
  adopted the DRM-free label and over 50 others were added to the DRM-
  free Guide.

- From the public administrations: Students and teachers at 160 high
  schools in the Brussels Region have started to use Free Software like
  LibreOffice or Mozilla Thunderbird on PCs and tablets. Joinup reports
  that France's ministry of Agriculture extensively uses Free Software:
  For instance in 2012 it spent 174,000 euro on support for Free
  Software. Additionally news from France: Lucile wrote about theZombie
  Free Software provision -- a Free Software law for France's higher
  education -- and how to contact politicians.

- For those amongst you giving talks at conferences: LWN now offers a
  handycalendar for call for papers.

- From theplanet aggregation:

  - Former FSFE president Georg Greve wrote a tetralogy about the Post
    PRISM society. Heputs together what actually has been proven so
    far,what that means for society,what the implications for businesses
    around the world are, andtakes a look at governments. He argues that
    any government should be able to answer the following question: What
    is your policy on a sovereign software supply and digital
    infrastructure? If that question cannot be answered, he suggests it
    is time to get to work. And soon.

  - FSFE's president Karsten Gerloff wroteabout what you can do to
    secure your communications, e.g. participating in politics,

  - Werner Koch, author of GnuPG and FSFE GA member wrote about Gpg4win
    and the feds, commenting on a CT article which mentions GnuPG and
    claims that only a self compiled version is trustworthy.

  - and Kevin Keijzerdocumented how he maintains his online privacy.

  - Anonymisation hobbyist Jens Lechtenboergerexplains how he selects
    Tor guard nodes under global surveillance, and also publishing code
    how he analysed the situation.

  - A proposal for a new encrypted mobile messaging app called Hemlis
    received $125,000 in crowdfunding. It is good to see ambitious new
    software projects get support from the community when they are Free
    Software. Sam Tuke checks ifthis is really the case with Hemlis.

  - Viktor Horvathpublished the video from his talk at FOSDEM about
    SlapOS a decentralised Free Software plattform.

  - Lucile wrote about several examples of interesting uses of
    transparency policies, related to Free Software especially for
    France.

  - Should a person be bound by terms of use and contracts where that
    person has been effectively coerced into accepting them? Other
    questions about IT in universities are asked by Paul Boddie
    in"Students: Beware of the Academic Cloud!"

  - News from Martin Gollowitzer's"Tracking for Freedom" project: he is
    now cycling with the pros.

  - Mirko Böhm reports from his travel toAkademy and the Qt contributor
    summit. Together with Armijn Hemel he started a process to make
    defensive publications a routine part of the Qt release process,

  - and Free Software activities in Munich have intensified. Christian
    Kalkhoff and the Munich group now bought a pavilion to be present at
    more and more public events (German).



== Get active: Help with Crypto parties! ==

Crypto parties are getting more popular. They also attract funding from
non-free software companies. One company offered money to crypto party
organisers if they also mention non-free software (German). Good that a
lot of FSFE's volunteers already support the organisers to help people
install encryption software, and educate participants about Free
Software.

In the Free Software community a lot of us understand how end-to-end
encryption works. At the moment a lot of people new to Free Software
want to use it themselves. If you have some time, either help some
friends, colleagues, or search for local crypto parties and show others
how to use GnuPG for e-mail encryption, OTR for encrypted chats, TOR to
anonymise your online behaviour or programs like Jitsi to have encrypted
audio and video communications.

Thanks to all theFellows anddonors who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner -FSFE


-- 
Free Software Foundation Europe
FSFE News
Upcoming FSFE Events
Fellowship Blog Aggregation
Free Software Discussions
_______________________________________________
Press-release-sv mailing list
Press-release-sv at fsfeurope.org
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/press-release-sv