FSFE Newsletter - December 2010

Sat Dec 4 16:37:53 CET 2010

= FSFE Newsletter - December 2010 =

[Permanent URL: http://www.fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201012.en.html ]

This edition covers the current developments in Open Standards policy,
some basic information about software patents, an update from FSCONS
about distributed computing, and how you can support us in the end of
the year.

This month was the first time in FSFE's history that we had a booth at
three conferences at the same date: the [1]Brandenburger Linux Infotag
(BLIT) in Potsdam/Germany, the [2]Free Society Conference and Nordic
Summit (FSCONS in Göteburg/Sweden, and [3]T-DOSE Eindhoven/The
Netherlands. Our [4]PDFreaders campaign is quite successful: 31 public
administrations already removed advertisements for non-free PDF readers
from their websites, 8 of them added links to pdfreaders.org. FSFE's
sysadmins [5]updated the Fellowship blog software, and we gave several
presentations to politicians, parties, the public administration, and
the Berlin Debating Union. [6]This month Fellowship interview is with
Brian about free documentation, emacs org mode, and his understanding of
software as a tool. And finally we would like to congratulate Bjarni
Rúnar Einarsson, Free Software developer and community builder from
Iceland, who has received the [7]Nordic Free Software Award.

== Open Standards: India - Europe 1:0 ==

This month [8]India's government announced its Open Standards policy,
which is a huge success for the Free Software movement. The advantages
for Free Software in India were definitely worth the three-year struggle
with the proprietary software companies. When reading the government's
papers you will [9]recognise several points that were included in
[10]our Open Standards definition, especially the ones already covered
in the [11]October edition of the newsletter: that patents on standards
should be available on a royalty-free basis. This policy will foster
innovation in India's IT market, it will lead to smaller costs for the
public administration, and will enable programmers to be more
innovative.

The European Commission is also setting out to reform Europe's
standardisation system. Standardisation in Europe is currently dominated
by a small number of organisations, mainly big companies. At the same
time, much innovation is done by small and medium-sized companies.
Although numerous, they do not really have a voice in standardisation.
When having the opportunity to participate they often struggle because
of a lack of time, money or expertise. So while the Indian document
[12]improved between revisions, the [13]European Interoperability
Framework (EIF) has only got worse . But with your ongoing support we
can [14]continue to explain the importance of Open Standards to the
European Commission and the member states, so they can provide us the
same advantages as the Indian government. This month by participating at
an joint [15]event from the European Commission and the European Patent
Office.

== Software patents: Not another monopoly on software ==

Another topic we highlighted at the meeting from the European Commission
and [16]in a radio interview (in German) were software patents.

To begin with, a patent is a monopoly on an idea, whereas copyright is a
monopoly on a concrete implementation. While Beethoven's II symphony is
covered by copyright, a patent would give a monopoly on the idea to
combine bowed and wind instruments. Software falls under the copyright.
This makes sense, with software you [17]have little research costs, but
you have to spend a lot of time implementing the ideas to make sure
there are no security problems, and you can easily maintain and adapt it
in future. The idea to combine bowed and wind instruments is not a big
challenge, the challenge is how to combine them so it still sounds good
in the end.

More and more people understand that [18]software patents are a problem
for everybody , no matter if big or small companies, individual software
developers, users, non-free or Free Software.

- The companies have to spent more money for their legal department, to
  register patents, to negotiate patent crosslicensing, and to defend
  themselves against patent claims. While for some time software patents
  are a nice tool for big companies to prevent newcomers to compete with
  them, they also have to face companies who only sue others on software
  patents, and never do any software development by themselves. Against
  them, any software company can only loose.
- For software developers software patents mean legal uncertainty:
  whenever you start programming you might violate law. You will never
  be able to find out if you violate a patent. Even if you read a
  software patent you might not realise it covers what you are currently
  implementing. With patents, we have to pay money to register them. On
  the other hand with copyright, everybody of us even those who just
  program as a hobby can write a program, and afterwards this falls
  under copyright without any additional costs. In fact, software
  patents can dispossess us as they can prevent from using the rights we
  get from copyright, e.g. to distribute the program to others.
- Users would have to pay for all those costs. Some people estimate that
  the patent costs for smartphones are about 20% of the actual price
  payed by the customer.

We will continue to get rid of that problem. In the US our sister
organisation is working to [19]build awareness to the harm caused by
software patents and in New Zealand the government understood the
problem and [20]recommended in April to include computer programs
amongst inventions that may not be patented. In Europe the legislation
has decided that software is not patentable. But laws are always
interpreted by people, and in this case interpretations of the law
differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by
declaring them as "computer implemented inventions". We will continue to
work with our [21]sister organisations , our [22]associated organisation
FFII , and others to inform people about the dangers of software
patents. We will explain the legislative that they have to make the laws
more precise so that the patent offices have to act as intended.

== Distributed computing at FSCONS ==

We know that distributed computing is not a brand new topic. In fact
there is a 7:21 minutes [23]commercial from 1959 about it, and some of
the ideas might still be relevant for the current "cloud computing"
discussion.

Our part here was to host a track a this year's FSCONS called [24]Divide
and Reconquer , which focused on the problem of the trend towards
centralised non-free Internet services, and possible solutions. Thanks
to [25]Sam's work and our speakers, all five talks went well, each
generating extensive discussion in the question and answer sessions.

For example [26]this month Fellowship interviewee Brian Gough even said
to me after Michael Christen's demonstration of the peer to peer
[27]search engine Yacy, that by the end of next year he only wants to
use distributed search engines for his web searches. Sounds like a good
New Year's resolution. We will continue to work on this topic and
animate more people to think about it, discuss it with others and work
on solutions.

== Get Active: Buy presents and donate - our support programs ==

End of the year often means buying presents and donating money. There
are some ways to combine those two things, for example our [28]support
programs. So if you or some of your friends already use Libri or Amazon
to buy presents, please inform them about the possibility to support us.

- If you buy books from [29]bookzilla.de we will receive around 5% of
  the sales as a donation.
- If you have installed [30]our plugin around 5% of your sale from
  amazon is donated to FSFE.

You can [31]read Maëlle's blog post to find out how much was donated
through those ways. If you buy your books and other presents from other
shops, you can of course support FSFE through a [32]one time donation or
on a regular basis by [33]becoming a Fellow of FSFE .

Best Regards,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE

   1. http://www.blit.org/
   2. http://www.fscons.org/
   3. http://www.t-dose.org/
   4. http://www.fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/pdfreaders.html
   5. http://blogs.fsfe.org/blog/2010/11/26/blogs-upgraded-more-information-on-the-wiki/
   6. http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=156
   7. http://www.fsfe.org/news/2010/news-20101108-01.html
   8. http://egovstandards.gov.in/approved-standards/egscontent.2010-11-12.9124322046/at_download/file
   9. http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/?p=420
  10. http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/def.html
  11. http://www.fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201010.html
  12. http://fosscomm.in/OpenStandards
  13. http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/eifv2.html
  14. http://www.fsfe.org/projects/os/os.html
  15. http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/?p=426
  16. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=690
  17. http://www.progfree.org/Patents/industry-at-risk.html
  18. http://en.swpat.org/wiki/All_businesses_are_targets
  19. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/software-patents-after-bilski
  20. http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/new-zealand-govt-against-software-patents/
  21. http://www.fsfe.org/about/fsfnetwork.html
  22. http://www.ffii.org/
  23. http://www.archive.org/download/AllAboutPolymorphics/AllAboutPolymorphics.ogv
  24. http://www.fscons.org/divide/
  25. http://blogs.fsfe.org/samtuke/?p=71
  26. http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=156
  27. http://www.yacy.net/
  28. http://wiki.fsfe.org/SupportPrograms
  29. http://www.bookzilla.de/
  30. http://wiki.fsfe.org/SupportPrograms
  31. http://blogs.fsfe.org/maelle/?p=94
  32. http://www.fsfe.org/donate/donate.html
  33. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/index.html

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