[FSFE PR][EN] FSF Europe Newsletter

Free Software Foundation Europe press at fsfeurope.org
Mon Sep 5 23:18:25 CEST 2005


1. Heading towards the GPLv3
2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy
3. AFFS General Meeting
4. Improving the infrastructure


1. Heading towards the GPLv3

The world wide network of Free Software Foundations is currently
preparing the next step in the evolution of the GNU General Public
License, the most used license in the Free Software world. While there
is no doubt that the current version (GPLv2) holds in court and is
applicable all over the world, the GPLv3 will address aspects that
were not as pressing or did not exist at the time the GPLv2 was
written, like programs that are used over the internet. Other issues
likely to be of interest are software patents, compatibility with
other copyleft licenses, DRM and TCP.

The Free Software Foundation Europe is determined to put as much time
and energy into this project as it needs to make the GPLv3 as powerful
and successful as the GPLv2 is.

The FSFE has set up a mailing list for public discussion of GPLv3, to
which you are invited to subscribe at

  https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/gplv3


2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy

Karsten Gerloff was asked to give a speech about the current
developments within the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)
and the A2K (Access To Knowledge) Treaty at ATTAC Germany's summer
academy in Goettingen. His talk was part of a seminar on intellectual
monopoly rights.

Karsten was also invited to attend a meeting of the ATTAC "Knowledge
Commons" working group.


3. AFFS General Meeting

On 13 August, FSFE's UK based associate organisation AFFS held its
General Meeting. Ciaran O'Riordan held a talk about what has been
achieved with regards to software patentability, and how the road
ahead looks like.


4. Infrastructure

As August was a quite unspectacular and not many events were scheduled
this month, the FSFE team worked on what could be considered "house
keeping" -- improving the infrastructure so we will be ready for the
next work-intensive months.

A new asterisk server allowing Voice Over IP connections within the
team and the reorganisation of mail distribution lists and internal
data repositories should help improving communication, which is always
a challenge when people are spread all over Europe.

The Fellowship was another target of improvements: while the current
system works well and stable, the time has come for the first round of
improvements. A major point is the upcoming migration of the portal
site www.fsfe.org from Plone to ez Publish.


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


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