FSFE Newsletter - March 2013Brussels flooded with Free Software activists
From February 1st to February 3rd thousands of people went to Brussels to
participate in FOSDEM -- the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European
Meeting. At FOSDEM you have the opportunity to meet developers and
contributors from nearly all major Free Software projects. FSFE is always there
to talk with people about ongoing developments and the needs and contributions
in the Free Software community. So it is a good place to exchange information,
talk with very interesting people, plan future activities, and meet all the
people you would usually just have e-mail contact with.
As in previous years, FSFE was present with a booth, answering questions
about current political topics and activities, distributing information material and – what every hacker needs – cool t-shirts. Fellow Mirko
Böhm has written a summary about FOSDEM, including tips on communication
for Free Software groups and projects, if we should embrace app stores and how
to share a trademark. Isabel Drost has documented FOSDEM in 9 blog posts: from
her
arrival with spider robots, about Trademarks
and Free Software, or the
panel discussion about GNU APL.
We were also present with several talks: For example our Finnish team
coordinator Otto
Kekäläinen gave a talk about "Fixing public procurement", our
vice-president Henrik Sandklef gave a talk
about Searduino, and Erik Albers presented our Free Your Android campaign (recording
available (webm).
As part of the FYA campaign, Several Fellows also participated in a meeting at the
European Parliament on Friday. It was organised by Alexander Alvaro,
Vice-President of the European Parliament (EP), together with the European Parliament Free Software User Group
(EPFSUG). He wanted his EP colleagues to learn how to regain control of
their data and how to install a free operating system and Free Software on
their Android devices.
Just three weeks later, we were shocked to hear that Mr Alvaro had a car
accident and is still in hospital with serious injuries. FSFE wishes him a fast
and full recovery.
Why we love Free Software
A lot of people followed our
call to participate in the I love Free Software activity. The result –
which has been summarised in a
report by FSFE's new interns Lucile Falgueyrac and Stepan Stehlicek – was
a lot of e-mails, blog posts, pictures and a comic strip. E.g., Fellow Mirko
Böhm explains why he loves Free Software:
The benefits of Free Software go beyond the individual
contributors and the communities they form. The four freedoms laid out as the
foundations of Free Software are a fanfare to the ability to exercise one’s
free will, to freely collaborate by helping your neighbors, to achieve
independence from directions other people have thought up for us. The effects
can be seen all around us – when teaching material for schools is developed
collaboratively and freely shared, when government data is opened up to
improve the transparency of the political process, when the technical
foundations of the internet and the operating systems running modern
technology become a common good, and in many other places. People start to
expect similar freedoms they learned to get used to in software when engaging
in society. And more participation is always better.
Something completely different
Our DFD team published a
video
tutorial, which explains how to watch Youtube videos using HTML5. Do
not miss this month's "get-active" item below, which is also about Document
Freedom Day.
We have received a report about a
successful case of Windows
tax refund in Croatia. One has to apply for the refund within 30
days of a purchase of an ASUS product and fill out a form in order to receive
€42 refund for Microsoft Windows 8 OEM.
LWN writes about
trademarks and
their limits, the idea behind trademarks, about how effective this
protection is, and gives examples of bad behaviour; e.g., offering Free
Software with unwanted toolbars and adware.
In FSFE we receive a lot of license questions, but we have not yet
evaluated how many we receive through country teams, our legal teams, or over
the phone.
Our sister organisation FSF reports
that they have responded to and resolved over 400 reports of suspected
license violations and over 600 general licensing and compliance
questions.
Your editor has written an article for the German news site Heise titled
"Politics
and Free Software". The article covers his experience from the
parliament working group on interoperability, standards, and Free
Software.
Guido Arnold
has
published the January update about Free Software in education, covering
news from the community and the government as well as upcoming events.
Mirko gave a talk at Embedded World 2013 about
defensive
publications.
Besides many other positive news from Joinup about Free Software in the
public administration: Member of the European Parliament
Amelia
Andersdotter wants public administrations to consider software freedom
as one of the reasons to select new ICT solutions, and the
city of Bolzano has
automated testing of e-government services on Free Software
systems.
Fellow Jelle Hermsen asked for blog aggregation for our Dutch Fellows,
and
now it is up and running.
From the
planet aggregation:
Anna Morris, who created the DFD video mentioned above, wrote about
Guake: a command-line tool for "dyslexics and beginners".
You wonder why we published the DFD as ".webm"?
Peter Bubestinger wrote a summary article
about different video formats from a Free Software perspective, explaining
that digital video consists of video codec, audio codec, and container
format. He explains the different codecs, and why some videos do not work
out of the box on a Free Software Distribution.
Beside this, Peter also wrote about
Tears of Steel, a movie made with Free
Software.
From Steel to Stealth: What could the Americans and British do to put
the stealth back into stealth bomber?
Daniel
Pocock explains why the US military might need the Free Software
lumical.
Mark Lindhout described
how to use RSYNC to delete remote folders and after inspiration from
the last Fellowship meeting in Berlin he also wrote about
why and how to play high-fidelity white noise.
Interested in a distributed solution for one-time-password
authentication on GNU/Linux operating systems?
Daniel wrote
about dynalogin which is providing this.
Thomas Løcke
describes how to use the Ada Web Server and,
Henri Bergius is thinking about
the flow-based programming user interface.
Get active: Organise an event for Document Freedom Day 2013
Help us to introduce more people to Open Standards – participate in Document Freedom Day 2013 on March
27th! Local teams can now promote their
events on DocumentFreedom.org, and have them marked on the global campaign
map.
In 2012 groups of volunteers ran 54 events in 23 different countries. If you
want to get some inspiration for your event, take a look at our activity packages
or the DFD
report from 2012. Help us to make this year's DFD the most successful
yet!
Thanks to all the Fellows and
donors who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
--
Free Software Foundation Europe
FSFE News
Upcoming FSFE Events
Fellowship Blog Aggregation
Free Software Discussions
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation
