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News Archive for 2008
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18 December 2008
This month we interviewed Johannes Böck about CAcert, Gentoo,
OpenStreetMap, privacy, security, and Free Software
businesses. This is the third in our series of Fellowship
interviews - "the smallest unit of freedom".
15 December 2008
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announces a translation sprint
for their web pages from 15 December 2008 to 11 January 2009. The aim of
this sprint is to provide information about Free Software and FSFE's work
in as many languages as possible.
10 December 2008
Today FSFE is announcing
its revised constitution,
adding two Fellowship Seats to its General Assembly. This will give
Fellows of FSFE a direct representation in FSFE's strategic decision
making body.
08 December 2008
FSFE's Freedom Task Force (FTF) and GPL-Violations.org today released a guide to reporting and fixing licence compliance issues. This guide will help users and developers to deal with license violation reports. It explains how to make a report, what information is useful to include, and offers suggestions for how projects or businesses can deal with reports once they are received.
02 December 2008
Following up on the "IPR in ICT Standardisation" Workshop two weeks ago
in Brussels, FSFE president Georg Greve analysed the conflicts between
patents and standards. The resulting paper is about the most harmful
effects of patents on standards, the effectiveness of current remedies,
and potential future remedies.
02 December 2008 – Georg C. F. Greve
The debates on the European Software Strategy
came across several issues that are of general interest, but the debates
themselves cannot be disclosed for reasons of procedural confidentiality.
Instead, this article takes one issue and discusses it from a personal
perspective.
28 October 2008
This month Ciarán O'Riordan interviewed Rolf Camps about translating,
volunteering, and awareness of Free Software in Belgium. Translations
are utterly crucial for a European organisation, and it's a lot of work
that doesn't get much visible credit, so Ciarán wanted to ask Rolf
about motivations and what's involved. This is the second in our series
of Fellowship interviews - "the smallest unit of freedom".
07 October 2008
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) supports Free Software so that every citizen can play an independent, active and responsible part in our information society. However, censorship of content, violations of the principle of 'Net Neutrality' and increasing online surveillance do not fit with these goals. FSFE is therefore appealing for participation in the world-wide day of action "Freedom Not Fear", which takes place this Saturday, the 11th October.
27 September 2008
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the initial announcement of the
GNU Project, a pioneering initiative to develop an operating system that gives
all users the freedom to modify it and publish modified versions, individually
or working together. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) commends the
substantial achievements of GNU's first quarter-century and looks forward to
furthering their shared goal of facilitating software freedoms.
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26 September 2008
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced today that it plans
to make the Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) available ten languages.
The selected languages are English, German, French, Italian, Swedish,
Serbian, Polish, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.
22 September 2008
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the GNU project FSFE will be
offering a 25% discount on merchandise from the 23th September until
the 17th October. Please note that this discount does not apply to
shipping costs.
31 August 2008
A folder with general information about FSFE and Free Software, and some
leaflets with specific information about FSFE's projects and activities
are now available online in HTML and PDF format. Everybody can download,
print, distribute!
22 August 2008
"We see the adoption of the FLA by KDE as a positive and important milestone in the maturity of the Free Software community," says Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "The FLA was designed to help projects increase the legal maintainability of their software to ensure long-term protection and reliability. KDE is among the most important Free Software initiatives and it is playing a central role in bringing freedom to the desktop. This decision of the KDE project underlines its dedication to think about how to make that freedom last."
18 June 2008
"Of course, it should be in the users interest to 'ride their bicycles independently', i.e. not having to rely on training wheels. However, the training wheels keep *****ren from falling and give freedom to both the *****ren and their parents. Likewise Wine helped to give freedom and security to the users. It is for this we are thankful and we recognise their work."
27 May 2008
"It is a clear, legal fact that distributing Free Software means
people must comply with the licences. GPL-Violations.org and the FTF
are now building the long-term legal infrastructure for support and
compliance" comments Harald Welte. Shane Coughlan adds "I believe our
new agreement will help ensure sustainability for legal infrastructure
to support Free Software in Europe."
02 April 2008
"Technologically speaking, the state of IS29500 is depressing," says
Marko Milenovic of FSFE's Serbian Team and co-chair of the Serbian
technical committee on DIS29500. "In large parts it is low quality
technical prose that fails to use the normative terminology mandated by
ISO/IEC's guidelines. We've been told to wait for the maintenance
process for MS-OOXML to become usable. That ISO would knowingly approve
a dysfunctional specification is disillusioning."
26 March 2008
Today is Document Freedom Day: Roughly 200 teams from more than 60
countries worldwide are organising local activities to raise awareness
for Document Freedom and Open Standards. [...] Document Freedom
is about giving you control of your information, it is about giving
governments control of their public records, and it is about freedom
of choice. You can give yourself that freedom today [...]
06 March 2008
At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive
behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP)
still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European
Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European
Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe
today launched a petition to call on the EP to use Open Standards so
that all citizens can participate in the democratic process.
05 March 2008
FSFE has released a context briefing on Interoperability problems caused by Microsoft's Office OpenXML format:
"The proposed MS-OOXML/DIS29500 specification raises serious technical and legal concerns.
This context briefing highlights three examples of how the proposed specification and
its practical implementation in MS Office 2007 hinders interoperability, fosters vendor
dependence and results in market distortion."
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01 March 2008
"The Freedom Task Force is working to foster effective legal
infrastructure for Free Software in Europe. A great deal of our work is
based on engaging directly with people and Google's contribution will
allow us to do this more effectively," says Shane Coughlan, FTF
Coordinator.
28 February 2008
The European Commission has fined Microsoft 899 million Euro for
anti-competitive behaviour by restricting access to interoperability
information. "Microsoft is the last company that actively promotes the use of
software patents to restrict interoperability. This kind of behaviour
has no place in an Internet society where all components should connect
seamlessly regardless of their origin," says Georg Greve, president of
the Free Software Foundation Europe.
22 February 2008
Yesterday's media briefing by Microsoft on its its pledge to release
interoperability information for flagship products contained little
actual news. Over the years Microsoft has made multiple similar pledges
and they at times proved to be detrimental rather than beneficial for
interoperability. Examining the terms of the Microsoft's latest action
shows no major change of policy.
20 February 2008
The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation
with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open
Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a
group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to,
the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe,
IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc. On 26 March 2008, the Document
Freedom Day will provide a global rallying point for Document
Liberation and Open Standards.
18 February 2008
When ECMA submitted MS-OOXML as ECMA-376 to ISO for fast-track
approval, several countries criticised overlap with the existing ISO
standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006, the Open Document Format (ODF). [...]
Considering that alleged preservation of idiosyncrasies is the stated
reason for the entire DIS-29500 ISO process, FSFE considers it
worthwhile to investigate this claim in greater depth.
14 February 2008
FSFE's Freedom Task Force today announces the first European Licensing and
Legal Workshop for Free Software will be held on Friday the 11th of April
in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The venue for this meeting is the
InterContinental Amstel Hotel.
18 January 2008
FSFE's Freedom Task Force was launched in November 2006 to help support
individuals, projects and businesses with Free Software licensing. The
initial phase of the FTF was possible thanks to support by the
Netherlands based philantropic organisation NLnet foundation. NLnet's
support allowed the FTF to provide training, consultancy and to work in
partnership with gpl-violations.org to resolve licence issues in the
European area. The FTF also formed networks of technical and legal
experts to foster cooperation between lawyers, projects and businesses
with licensing concerns. Now, after just over twelve months of
continual growth, NLnet is providing a second round of financial support
to this innovative legal project.