From September 2nd to 4th, the FSFE organised its first ever summit to bring together our pan-European community and Fellows for a whole weekend and to discuss contemporary and important issues regarding software freedom. On this occasion we also held our official party to celebrate 15 years of FSFE. Read our report including some pictures of the event and find a summary with all talks that have been held with links to our video-recordings.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

This month the FSFE newsletter comes for the first time with a call to raise our funds and progress in Russia to further Free Software on political level. Also read about our various activities or participate in our discussion about "Free Software business". As in every newsletter, you also find our out-of-the-community section with interesting news from our community and some good Free Software news from around the world.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

FSFE Newsletter - December 2016 Help us now to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017

This year, the FSFE celebrated its 15th birthday. 15 years of empowering users, supporting communities, and pushing for better legislation. 15 years during which we saw that all activities, even if considered small at the time, can become big when we work together. 15 years during which we saw that that all activities, even if considered impossible at the time, can succeed when we stand together. Together, we have even succeeded against the heaviest lobbying of large interest groups. All of this would not have been possible without the continuous support of our community, contributing thousands of hours of their work time and backing us financially. If you are a frequent reader of our newsletter, and you like our work but you are not yet part of our community ... then consider joining the FSFE!

Help us to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017: https://fsfe.org/join

Russian Bill makes Free Software a Public Priority

In mid October, the lower chamber of the Russian Federation ("Duma") approved a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation's public sector. It requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.

The legislators made an extra effort to ensure a proper use of language. The bill talks about "Free Software", explicitly mentions the four freedoms and even uses "GNU/Linux" to refer to the most widespread free operating system.

As our Policy Analyst Polina Malaja puts it: "The bill is an example of public software procurement done right."

What else have we done? At the beginning of October there was the annual meeting of the General Assembly of the FSFE. On this occasion Mirko Böhm, our current Fellowship representative, managed to untie the knot that was around our ideas to start evaluating "Free Software business". The genius might lie in not evaluating the companies but rather their activities. Matthias Kirschner summarised the whole background in his blog "There is no Free Software company - But!" and asks for feedback. After asking the political parties for the state's election in Berlin about their plans regarding the use and spread of Free Software and sending them three recommendations for actions (DE), we have now published an analysis of the coalition agreement of the new government in the state of Berlin (DE). Max Mehl writes a Report of Iron and Freedom and shares his memories from the OpenRheinRuhr 2016 which took place in Oberhausen. The FSFE was well represented with talks by Max Mehl himself, Matthias Kirschner, and Erik Albers, as well as an international info booth by German and Dutch Fellows. On November 12-13, the FSFE Country Team Netherlands held a booth at T-Dose in Eindhoven and organised a Dutch team-meeting in preparation of the upcoming elections in March. On November 16-17, the FSFE's Policy Analyst and Legal Coordinator Polina Malaja participated by giving a talk at the Open Source Summit 2016, that took place in Paris.

Help us to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017: https://fsfe.org/join

On November 23, Matthias Kirschner gave a talk for the .Net User Group Berlin-Brandenburg, presenting a general overview of the FSFE's mission and projects. Jonas Öberg, the FSFE's executive director, participated in a panel about Freedom of Panorama, copyright, openness and democracy in Linköping Sweden. The FSFE was also present with a Booth at the FIfFKon16 – in.visible systems on November 25-27. On November 28-29, Georg Greve, founding president of the FSFE, participated in a panel with MEP Julia Reda, discussing the future of Free Software in the European institutions at DIGITEC 2016 in Brussels. From the community Erik Albers, the FSFE's community builder, tried to reach out and localise our noCloud slogan with translations from all over the world. With the amazing help of Olga Gkotsopoulou, crowdsourcing went pretty well and in our wiki we now have almost 40 translations in several languages and dialects, from Japanese, Breton and Arabic, to Luxembourgish and Swabian. Erik summarised this activity and ways you can still contribute to the noCloud translations. We hope to use these translations to offer our favorite sticker in your own language or dialect soon. For everyone working with the FSFE website, like the web team or many translators, Max Mehl wrote a detailed explanation of how to locally build the whole FSFE website and then how to quickly build single XHTML files locally as well. Paul Boddie discusses the various impacts of computers on our work time, our careers, our self-development, free time, and the potential fulfillment of life in his blogpost On Not Liking Computers. Tarin Gamberini offers an overview of the third monitoring after the adoption of Free Software PDF readers in Italian Regional Public Administrations: ten Italian Regions have reduced advertisements for proprietary PDF readers on their websites. Iain R. Learmonth writes about PATHspider Plugins. Daniel provides us with a How-to for backing up and restoring data on Android devices directly via USB and shares his expertise benchmarking microSD cards. In the light of ever more Internet of things botnets, Daniel Pocock starts a discussion about the security of home devices running GNU/Linux-based firmware. Take action!

Help us now to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017.

Good Free Software news

Good news from public administrations in Europe and worldwide: Hungary aims to create a standard Free-Software based PC desktop configuration for all its ministries and central government departments. A parliament resolution urging the government to draft a migration plan to Free Software solutions was adopted by the Parliament of Navarre in Spain. France has added source code to the list of state documents covered by freedom of information laws, but introduces a new exception if disclosure would threaten government security.

Good news on European level: A Free Software FIWARE platform, funded by the European Commission creates new IoT opportunities for businesses, while the Joint Research Centre (JRC), as part of its active Free Software distribution policy, released Free Software for forestry and Internet risk awareness.

Under the light of the Transatlantic Open Data Partnership between EU-US, a new R library for economic data was developed and published on GitHub.

And finally, in 2016, Linux has been running on 99,6%, or 498 out of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world .

Help us to improve our newsletter

Do you think we have missed some news, or you'd like specific news to appear in the next newsletter? Please share this and any other feedback by writing to newsletter@fsfe.org

Thanks to all the volunteers, Fellows and corporate donors who enable our work,

your editors Olga Gkotsopoulou and Erik Albers, FSFE

PS: Because of the holiday season there will not be a newsletter in January.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

Help us now to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017

This year, FSFE celebrated its 15th birthday. 15 years of empowering users, supporting communities and pushing for better legislation. 15 years to see that all activities, even if considered small at the time, can become big when we work together. 15 years to see that all activities, even if considered impossible at the time, can succeed when we stand together. Together, we sometimes succeeded even against the heaviest lobbying of large interest groups. 15 years to know that all of this would not have been possible without the continuous support of our community, contributing thousands of hours of their work time and backing us financially. Help us now to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017.

Public Money - Public Code

In the mid of next year we will be launching a new campaign to reach out into new audiences. Under the slogan of "Public Money, Public Code", we will illuminate how public money is constantly (mis-)used in countries across Europe by paying for proprietary software, vendor lock-in and dependency. Investing in Free Software, instead, will serve public needs and interest on a big scale. The campaign aims to make Free Software a mandatory requirement in public procurement by law, but more importantly, in practice too. If Free Software becomes the default in public administration, this will have massive positive impact on other areas and the empowerment of our society. We will align with other political organisations and together focus on getting this message out.

The strength of this campaign depends on your support. Every donation helps: We need to produce a lot of information material and spread it around, we like to train activists and bring them together, we want to facilitate travel costs to bring people together with local decision makers in politics and public administration. Also we are in contact with a professional video artist to create a video that explains the benefits of publicly funded Free Software in a way anyone can understand. This will help us to go viral.

Please help us get this message out with your donation before the next year starts and give our movement for Free Software in public administration the decisive boost it needs.

Our creative campaign team

Challenges in 2017

Of course, running this campaign will not stop us from doing other important activities and to stand up for Free Software where necessary. If you decide to join us with your continuous support, you can be assured to found the best way to help our movement and the furthering of Free Software throughout the year and to support various activities. To mention just a few of them:

At this moment, the European Commission is currently revising copyright to be more adaptable for the digital age. To get them things right, we will continue to raise awareness and address the dangerous implications of technical restrictions measures forced on users by the revised copyright rules. Important elections will be held in 2017 in many European countries. We will be working hard to convince candidates of the importance of Free Software and thereby improving future policy decisions. We will increase our efforts to empower even more users to challenge the corporations and legislations that limit their freedom. We will support booths on events all over Europe and encourage the launch of more local groups.

Connecting Europe

Help us now to grow bigger and make a difference in 2017!

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

Since the start of the FSFE 15 years ago, the people involved were certain that companies are a crucial part to reach our goal of software freedom. For many years we have explained to companies – IT as well as non-IT – what benefits they have from Free Software. We encourage individuals and companies to pay for Free Software, as much as we encourage companies to use Free Software in their offers. While more people demanded Free Software, we also saw more companies claiming something is Free Software or Open Source Software although it is not.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation