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FSFE Newsletter - April 2015 Jonas Öberg visiting Boston without a pink backpack

Our new Executive Director Jonas Öberg gave a talk at Libreplanet, and visited Boston to meet FSF board members and staff. In his blog posts he wrote about his meetings with Matthew Garret, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bradley Kuhn, Henry Poole from FSF's board, FSF's staff as well as FSF's Executive Director John Sullivan discussing how to improve cooperation and the two main challenges he sees for FSFE:

analysing Free Software from legal, technical, and social dimensions and ensuring that any challenges to Free Software within those areas are met, assuring that in a world of free and open everything, Free Software is what ties everything together: you can not have open data, open ecology, open government or open educational resources without Free Software.

Furthermore he looks back to his first visit, at that time in his capacity as GNU webmaster, in December 1999 with a pink backpack.

FSFE supporting the Christoph Hellwig GNU GPL enforcement lawsuit

FSFE welcomes the action which Christoph Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy are taking to bring VMware into compliance with the GNU General Public License.

Free Software is a public resource, and it is governed by legal rules and social norms. Anyone who draws on this resource without respecting those rules and norms damages the community at large. The great majority of such problems are successfully resolved through dialogue and goodwill. It is only when dialogue fails that legal steps become necessary in order to protect this resource which we all share.

While FSFE regrets that this lawsuit has arisen, we believe that safeguarding Free Software against those who try to appropriate for themselves what belongs to us all is of the utmost importance.

Joint statement on the use of Open Standards in the European Commission

Open Standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of charge and restriction and for which no specific software from a particular vendor is required. It is important that every EU citizen and company should have the right to communicate and interact with its administration using Open Standards exclusively, and not be forced to install and use software from any specific vendor.

At Document Freedom Day (DFD), the international day to celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards, April (the French Free Software organisation), European Digital Rights (EDRi), Open Forum Europe (OFE), the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), and FSFE published a joint statement. Besides generally highlighting the topic, the statement focuses on the improper use of standards in the context of applying for EU programmes. (A full report about the 60 DFD events in 31 countries will be published at the beginning of April.)

Something completely different Just how transparent does the European Parliament have to be? In its own rules of procedure, the Parliament has set itself the high standard of conducting its affairs in “utmost transparency”. Our president Karsten Gerloff reports from an interesting discussion “Ensuring utmost transparency – Free Software and Open Standards under the Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament”, and what that means in practice. The German Ministry of Economics published a first draft law to ban compulsory routers (German). Except missing enforcement measures FSFE welcomes the draft. We update the timeline and our overview pages so people outside German could reuse our experiences to fight compulsory routers in other countries, too. At a panel discussion, organised by the European Patent Office, about patents, standards, and Free Software your editor experienced an unexpected but positive turn. The New Yorker notes the 30th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto and published a longer article about Richard Stallman and the start of GNU and copyleft. This year the Free Software Award went to Sébastien Jodogne for his work on Free software Medical imaging with his project Orthanc and to Reglue, which gives GNU/Linux computers to underprivileged children and their families in Austin, Texas. FSFE welcomes Nicolas Dietrich in its General Assembly. He was elected by our sustaining members, and thereby holds one of the two Fellowship GA seats. From the planet aggregation: Peter Bubestinger explains how he saved the songs of a friend's iPod with Free Software. In his new job, former FSFE intern Nicolas Jean published EvQueue, a job scheduler and queuing engine, as Free Software. Paul Boddie wrote about the BBC Micro Bit, a computing device, which the BBC plan to give to each child in the UK starting secondary school. Franz Gratzer highlighted some English interviews held during FOSDEM, and wrote about the booth presence of freie.it, which was founded by some members of FSFE’s Viennese Fellowship group, as a web platform to help people who are interested in using Free Software but who do not want to administrate their own computers. Fellow Karl Beecher explained why his company Endocode supports FSFE as silver donor, and Mirko Böhm, also part of Endocode, wrote about his activites, including meeting with Jonas Öberg, FSFE’s new Executive Director. Nico Rikken wrote about his discussions with the Fairphone producers Mario Fux wondered if Konqi -- the KDE mascot -- is male or female. And Daniel Pocock explains how you can become your own OpenID provider. Get active: Spread the message with Free Software merchandise

During the last weeks, many people ordered our “There is no cloud, just other people's computers” stickers. Now Rich Folsom wrote a Chromium Browser add-in, which converts “the cloud” to “other people's computers”.

Since so many people like the slogan, we now also have the corresponding “There is no cloud, just other people's computers” bags in our webshop. Furthermore we have a new Open Standard t-shirt with robots in fitted light blue or a non-fitted khaki, the “I love Free Software” t-shirt in light blue, or a fitted “Hacking for Freedom” t-shirt in grey, as well as the metallic “GNU/Linux inside” stickers and a golden GNU pin.

If you want to spread the Free Software message at work, conferences, or when you are shopping, you can order the equipment on our merchandise page.

Thanks to all the volunteers, Fellows and corporate donors who enable our work, Matthias Kirschner - FSFE

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Aufruf zur Auswertung: Kleine Anfrage zum Auswärtigen Amt

Die Grünen im Bundestag haben kleine Anfrage zu Thema "Freie Software im Auswärtigen Amt" (pdf) gestellt. Die Bundesregierung hat diese Anfrage nun beantwortet.

Die FSFE hat die Rückmigration des Auswärtigen Amtes zu unfreier Software seit langem kritisch begleitet. Wir rufen nun alle Interessierten dazu auf, die Antwort der Bundesregierung gemeinsam mit uns öffentlich auszuwerten.

"Die angeblichen Vorteile unfreier Software, mit denen die Bundesregierung die Abkehr vom Freie-Software-Kurs im Auswärtigen Amt begründete, sind offenbar nicht eingetroffen", sagt Karsten Gerloff, Präsident der Free Software Foundation Europe. "Eine schlüssige Begründung für die Rückkehr zu einem proprietären Betriebssystem im AA bleibt uns die Bundesregierung weiter schuldig."

Mehr Hintergrund zu der Anfrage gibt es in einem Artikel des Bundestagsabgeordneten Konstantin von Notz.

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A cautious welcome to the EC's new Free Software strategy

The European Commission has published a new version of its strategy for the internal use of Free Software. The strategy now covers the 2014-2017 timeframe. FSFE has provided extensive input to the Commission during the update process.

While the strategy is broadly similar to the previous version, there are a number of marked improvements:

A more determined attitude to Free Software. This is a minimum requirement for the strategy to have at least some impact in an environment where proprietary software is deeply entrenched. The new strategy talks about creating "a level playing field" for Free Software, and giving it "active and fair consideration".

An approach to Open Standards that goes beyond the watered-down revision of the European Interoperability Framework: "the Commission shall promote the use of products that support recognised, well-documented and preferably open technical specifications that can be freely adopted, implemented and extended".

A commitment to make it easier for Commission developers to participate in external Free Software communities.

"This document is essentially a statement of intent by the Commission," says FSFE's president Karsten Gerloff. "There are many actions the Commission could take to make use of the advantages offered by Free Software and Open Standards - procurement practices come to mind. That said, the new strategy represents a change for the better, and we are happy to see the Commission moving in the right direction."

Crucially, the strategy is accompanied by an action plan aimed at putting it into practice, unlike previous versions. However, the action plan is not public, so it is not possible to assess the Commission's progress towards its own goals. FSFE hopes that the Commission will eventually publish the action plan.

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FSFE supports Hellwig's GPL compliance lawsuit

FSFE welcomes the action which Christoph Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy are taking to bring VMware into compliance with the GNU General Public License.

FSFE's president Karsten Gerloff comments: "Free Software is a public resource, and it is governed by legal rules and social norms. Anyone who draws on this resource without respecting those rules and norms does damage to the community at large. The great majority of such problems are successfully resolved through dialogue and goodwill. It is only when dialogue fails that legal steps become necessary in order to protect this resource which we all share.

While FSFE regrets that this lawsuit has arisen, we believe that safeguarding Free Software against those who try to appropriate for themselves what belongs to us all is of the utmost importance.

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Joint statement : Maximising inclusiveness and engagement through the use of Open Standards in the European Commission

Today is Document Freedom Day, the international day to celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. On this occasion, we would like to reflect on the importance for public institutions in general, and for the European Commission in particular, considering its leadership role, of using Open Standards in all their digital communication and services.

Open Standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of charge and restriction and for which no specific software from a particular vendor is required. They are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice based on the merits of different software applications. For a public institution such as the European Commission, this is especially important because every EU citizen and company should have the right to communicate and interact with its administration using Open Standards exclusively, and not be forced to install and use software from any specific vendor. That is why we take this opportunity of Document Freedom Day, to voice our concerns on the improper use of standards in the context of applying for EU programmes.

Nowadays, when applying for most EU programmes, applicants are typically required to fill in PDF forms that use elements only implemented in proprietary software from a particular vendor (Adobe), software that is currently not available on all platforms. This is a problem for many applicants who end up bereft of choice or excluded from the process altogether. It does not have to be this way, when a number of efficient alternatives exist that are entirely based on Open Standards. Generally, we would advise against the use of PDF for online forms, and would instead recommend solutions based Open Web Standards like HTML5 and XForms. With this joint statement, we call on the European Commission to address this situation and ensure that all interactions with the public can be performed entirely using Open Standards, thereby ensuring maximum inclusiveness and freedom of choice for all European citizens.

Signatories :

Jean-Christophe Becquet, President, April

Karsten Gerloff, President, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)

Andreas Krisch, President, European Digital Rights (EDRi)

Graham Taylor, CEO, OpenForum Europe (OFE)

Peter Ganten, Chairman of the board, Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA)

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